Disorder
Experimental
•
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
Up Next in Experimental
-
What Rules the Invisible
Directed by Tiffany Sia • Documentary • 2022 • 10 minutes
What Rules The Invisible is a short film that upends archival travelogue footage shot in Hong Kong. Spanning reappropriated amateur footage across the 20th century, the sojourner’s gaze—distanced, distorted and even voyeuristic—shows trop...
-
The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses ...
Directed by Jim Finn • Documentary • 2020 • 61 minutes
For four years in the 1860’s half of the United States was held hostage by an unrecognized white supremacist republic. Shot on 16mm in national military parks, swamps, forests and the suburban sprawl across the former battlefields, the film ...
-
Do Not Circulate
Directed by Tiffany Sia • Documentary • 2021 • 17 minutes
Do Not Circulate, an experimental short film directed by Tiffany Sia, attempts a structuralist and materialist approach to unraveling the entrails of a collective media memory. Paced by an essay as a relentless voiceover, the film rips fo...
