Movies: Zhang Mengqi

As coronavirus begins to sweep the globe, Zhang returns to her father’s village with her camera, seeking to understand where the extraordinary phenomenon might sit in the grand palimpsest of China’s history. As with all of Zhang’s work, this is a com...

After Self-Portrait: At 47 Km, Zhang Mengqi pursues her contributions to the Folk Memory Project, relentlessly questioning the survivors of the 1959-61 famine in her village, “47 kilometres” (47 km from Suizhou, in Hebei Province)....

In the Chinese countryside, an old woman tells the story of her deceased son, while a little girl paints her dreams on the walls of the house. A personal and attentive perspective on the territory, which articulates the memory of a disappearing gener...

The first part of Wu Wenguang's Autobiography film series....

Luo Luo’s intense fear of Covid-19 keeps her in the house during the pandemic. She listens to her father relate their family history, and spends time on Zoom with fellow Folk Memory Project members Wu Wenguang and Zhang Mengqi....

The 23-year-old director, fresh out of university, lives at home with her mother and grandmother. She rebels against them but also tries to understand the generation gap between them. While she gets angry and questions their expectations of her as a ...

This village is located 47 KM from Suizhou, Hubei Province. Her grandfather passed away, and what does the village mean to her without him? She started to search for stories about death in the village: some are of unnatural causes, some are bizarre, ...

The newest instalment in a series set in a small village in a mountainous region in China. In the winter marking ten years since the director began filming, she tries to get a new building constructed in the village. The girls, who had thus far been ...

When the pandemic broke out, the filmmaker began to document the outside world from her window. A public space, Blue House, was finally realised but made empty for an indefinite time....

Edited together from materials taken from Caochangdi performances and activities between 2012-2013 and Wu Wenguang's own body camera record, this film can be regarded as a kind of "story follow-up" version of "Because of Hunger". In short, it is a ki...

The village in the mountains of China that the director has long made the subject of her camera. The traces of memories and landscapes that fade away before one’s eyes. An 85-year-old man is recounting the story of half of his life, while a young gir...

This film is the second segment of my “Autobiography Series.” From the moment when my mother disclosed a long kept secret, my birth was accompanied by many struggles for my mother. Those “struggles” include: during pregnancy, “should this child be ke...

This is the fourth film in my self-portrait series. I went back to the village named 47 km in 2013. My grandfather was critically ill, and I accompanied him like accompanied the death. The old people and their memories are like dead leaves. I got fam...

The fifth title in Zhang Mengqi's Self-Portrait film series....

The young filmmaker returns to her village to interview the elderly on the Chinese famine of 1958-60. But the villagers' replies direct her back to the memory of her own family....

Between 1959 and 1961, more than 35 million people starved to death because of Mao’s Great Leap Forward policies. To avoid censorship in China, this painful period is now euphemistically referred to as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters.” This cou...

The film is about the first two years in the Memory Project. All images was from my angle with my camera....

The third part in Wu Wenguang's Autobiography film series....