Disorder
Plastics & Pollution • 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 Plastics & Pollution
-
The Secret Life of Your Clothes
Directed by Andy Wells • Documentary • 2016 • 59 minutes
Each year, we give thousands of tons of our unwanted clothes to charity. But where do they actually go? It turns out most are exported to Africa. And even though we have given them away for free, our castoffs have created a multimillion-do...
-
Racing To Zero
Directed by Christopher Beaver • Documentary • 2015 • 55 minutes
Only one third of the waste in the United States is recycled or composted. Why? Industry, through its practice of planned obsolescence, plays a major role; our lives are almost totally dependent on unrecyclable petroleum products. ...
-
Plane Truths
Directed by Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin • Documentary • 2018 • 33 minutes
The recent expansion of Navy training activities in the Northwest has many local residents concerned. Will more of our communities become collateral damage?
Community members on Whidbey Island, the San Juans, and the Ol...
