Sunset Screenings | This June, Rediscover Our Tables Through Four Films

🏆 Best Low-to-Medium Budget Feature Film, 37th Golden Rooster Awards

A road accident, a round of redundancies, unemployment, family pressure — all crash down at once, and Weili (Song Ningfeng), an executive at a food-delivery platform, watches his life spiral out of control. In a moment of carelessness, he knocks down one of his own company’ s riders, desperate to meet a delivery deadline. As blame is apportioned and both law and conscience are put to the test, Weili begins to question the values he once held unshakeably — and the truth lurking beneath the torrent of algorithms starts to reveal its monstrous face…

The film turns its lens on workers in the platform economy era, using a single accident to lay bare the complex entanglement of algorithms, efficiency and humanity. When “ on-time delivery” has become simply taken for granted, are we still seeing the people running along the streets?

📌 Post-screening open discussion

🏆 Silver Prize for Permanent Collection, 5th China Ethnographic Documentary Academic Biennale

China is the centre of origin of rice, and Yunnan is one of the earliest regions where rice was domesticated. In 2004, the environmental organisation Greenpeace handed cameras to five ethnic-minority rice farmers, producing the photography collection “ The Path of Rice”. Over the following decade, four of those five rice-farmer photographers gave up growing rice. “ Asking the Rice” explores the question “ Who produces our rice?”, returning to the mountains of south-west China through long-term anthropological observation to document the changes wrought on rural life by the pressures of the market economy: traditional farming knowledge gradually fading, land and livelihoods under threat, and precious local rice varieties disappearing.

Tracing the lives of these five rice farmers, the film bears witness to a decade of transformation in the modes of production, ways of life and cultural traditions across rural south-west China. Following the clues of time and geography woven through the film, we are invited to rethink the relationship between food, the environment and the countryside — and how it shapes every one of our lives.

 – Post-Screening Guests –   

🏆 Selected for the 5th World Nomadic Film Festival and the 6th China Ethnographic Documentary Film Festival

In the pastoral areas around Qinghai Lake, the influx of large volumes of imported frozen beef and mutton onto the market has steadily undermined the local livestock industry with low-price meat.

Supported by Foodthink’ s Lianhe Creative Programme, the directors delved into frozen wholesale markets, cold-chain warehouses, pastoralist households, butchers’ shops and fattening farms, documenting the changes taking place behind the imported-meat trade: falling prices for cattle and sheep, dwindling incomes for pastoralists, mounting loan pressures, and increasingly difficult trading for local meat sellers. When we pick up cheaper beef and mutton in the supermarket, who at the other end of the global trade chain is bearing the cost?

This year marks the United Nations’ International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. We hope this film will help more people understand the real circumstances faced by the grasslands and their pastoralists.

   – Post-Screening Guests –   

If you enjoy kombucha, sourdough, kimchi, natto or rice wine, chances are you have heard of Sandor Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation.

In 2016, this fermentation researcher — widely regarded as a leading figure of the modern fermentation movement — travelled to south-western China, tracing a journey along the thread of fermented foods. Sichuan paocai, Dong rice-wine pickled fish, Guizhou hairy tofu, Pixian doubanjiang… The camera records not only the making of fermented foods, but also how people across different regions use fermentation to preserve food, pass on cultural traditions, and co-create flavours with microorganisms.

For fermentation enthusiasts, this is a flavour journey that spans regions and cultures; for everyone who loves food, it is also an opportunity to rediscover the wisdom of tradition.

  – Post-Screening Guests –