Disorder
China • 58m
Directed by Huang Weikai • Documentary • 2009 • 58 minutes
Huang Weikai's one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China's major cities today. As urbanization in China advances at a breakneck pace, Chinese cities teeter on the brink of mayhem. One man dances in the middle of traffic while another attempts to jump from a bridge before dozens of onlookers. Pigs run wild on a highway while dignitaries swim in a polluted river. Unshowable on China's heavily controlled television networks, Disorder reveals an emerging underground media, one that has the potential to truly capture the ground-level upheaval of Chinese society.
Huang Weikai collects footage from a dozen amateur videographers and weaves them into a unique symphony of urban social dysfunction. Huang shatters and reconstructs a world that's barely comprehensible, though with palpable energy - vibrant, dangerous, and terrifying.
"One of the most mesmerizing films I've seen in ages." —Hua Hsu, The Atlantic
"Lurid, voyeuristic and surreal, suggesting a cross between the work of the New York tabloid photographer Weegee, whose oeuvre was first collected as NAKED CITY, and the mother of all sensational documentaries, MONDO CANE." —J. Hoberman, The New York Times
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