Sunset Screenings | This June, Rediscover Our Dining Table Through Four Films

🏆 37th Golden Rooster Award for Best Low- and Medium-Budget Feature Film

Car accidents, job cuts, unemployment and family pressure strike at once, and the life of Wei Li (played by Song Ningfeng), a senior executive at a takeaway platform, spirals out of control. In an accident, he inadvertently drives into one of his own company’s takeaway riders, who is rushing to make a delivery. As the pursuit of accountability over who is to blame in the crash unfolds, Wei Li is faced with the twin tests of law and humanity. He gradually begins to doubt the values he had once held without question, and the truth hidden in the flood of algorithms gradually shows its ugly face…

The film turns its lens on workers in the era of the platform economy and, through a single accident, uncovers the complex relationship among algorithms, efficiency and humanity. When “on-time delivery” is taken for granted, do we see the people racing along the roads?

📌 Open discussion after this screening

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

China is the country of origin of rice, and Yunnan is one of the earliest regions where rice was domesticated. In 2004, the environmental organisation Greenpeace gave several cameras to five rice farmers from ethnic minority groups, and together they produced the photography collection “The Path of Rice”. Over the following decade, four of these five rice-farmer photographers gave up growing rice. “Asking the Rice” is built around the question “Who Produces Our Rice?” and, through long-term anthropological observation, returns to the mountainous southwest of China to record the changes taking place in rural areas under the impact of the market economy: traditional farming wisdom is gradually being lost, land and livelihoods face challenges, and some precious local rice cultivars are also disappearing.

Through the life journeys of five rice farmers, the film bears witness to the changes over the past decade in production methods, ways of life and cultural traditions in rural communities in southwest China. Following the film’s clues of time and place, we can rethink the relationship among food, the environment and the countryside, and how these affect each person’s life.

 – Guest for the Post-Screening Discussion –   

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

In the pastoral areas around Qinghai Lake, after large quantities of imported frozen beef and lamb have entered the market, low-priced meat products have continued to disrupt the local livestock industry.

With support from the Foodthink Lianhe Creative Programme, the directors spent time in frozen wholesale markets, cold-chain warehouses, herder households, butcher shops and fattening farms, documenting the changes unfolding behind the imported meat trade: falling purchase prices for cattle and sheep, declining incomes for herders, rising loan pressures, and an increasingly difficult business for local meat sellers. When we buy cheaper beef and lamb in supermarkets, who is bearing the cost at the other end of the global trade chain?

This year coincides with the United Nations “International Year of Grasslands and Herders”. We hope this film will help more people understand the realities facing grasslands and herders.

   – Guest for the Post-Screening Discussion –   

If you like kombucha, sourdough bread, pickles, natto or rice wine, you have probably heard of the author of “The Fermentation Bible”—Sandor Katz.

In 2016, this fermentation researcher, hailed as “a leading figure of the modern fermentation movement”, came to the southwest of China, travelling along the trail of fermented foods. Sichuan pickles, Dong rice-wine pickled fish, Guizhou hairy tofu, Pixian doubanjiang… The film not only records how fermented foods are made, but also shows how people in different regions use fermentation to preserve food, pass on cultural traditions and create flavour together with microorganisms.

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

 – Guest for the Post-Screening Discussion –