These are the Asian films and Asia related films that will be screened at the Doc Edge Film Festival which will take place from June 1 until July 10, 2022 in various cities around New Zealand and online.

– Feature Films –

On the travels of one piece of marble from mine to market we meet the colourful characters whose lives are devoted to the commoditisation of things both ancient and new. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
June 18, 2022 | Saturday | Silky Otter Cinemas (Auckland) | 12:15 pm
June 18, 2022 | Saturday | Silky Otter Cinemas (Christchurch) | 12:15 pm
July 10, 2022 | Sunday | The Roxy 1 (Wellington) | 10:00 am
Available onliny from June 19 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

After an earthquake razed the Chinese city of Sichuan to the ground in 2008, more than 6,000 parents were encouraged to replace the children they lost and move on. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
June 19, 2022 | Sunday | The Capitol (Auckland) | 10:30 am
June 25, 2022 | Saturday | Silky Otter Cinemas (Christchurch) | 10:30 am
July 2, 2022 | Saturday | The Roxy 1 (Wellington) | 10:15 am
Available online from June 20 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

The story of Delhi’s environmental toxicity and its escalating civil unrest is woven together by an unlikely figure, a bird – the black kite. In Delhi’s polluted air, black kites routinely collide into buildings and drop out of the sky. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
June 25, 2022 | Saturday | The Civic (Auckland) | 10:00 am
July 3, 2022 | Sunday | The Roxy 1 (Wellington) | 10:30 am
Available online from June 26 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

China transformed from a closed-off society and impoverished country to becoming one of the world’s economic leaders. This 2022 Academy Award-nominated film asks what happens to the people of a nation undergoing such drastic changes in such a short time span as they pursue the “Chinese Dream”? But what does the dream look like on an individual level, from the bottom up? (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
June 19, 2022 | Sunday | The Capitol (Auckland) | 12:45 pm
July 3, 2022 | Sunday | The Embassy 3 (Wellington) | 5:15 pm
Available online from June 20 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

Di is a 12-year-old girl living in a village lost in the Northwest Vietnam mountains. She belongs to the Hmong ethnic minority where women get married very young, enduring the controversial tradition of “bride-kidnapping”. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
June 19, 2022 | Sunday | Silky Otter Cinemas (Auckland) | 12:00 pm
June 19, 2022 | Sunday | Silky Otter Cinemas (Christchurch) | 12:00 pm
July 2, 2022 | Saturday | The Roxy 1 (Wellington) | 2:30 pm
Available online from June 20 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

Palawan appears to be an idyllic tropical island. Its powder-white beaches and lush forests have made it one of Asia’s hottest new tourist destinations. But for a tiny network of environmental crusaders and vigilantes trying to protect its spectacular natural resources, it is more akin to a battlefield. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
June 18, 2022 | Saturday | The Capitol (Auckland) | 6:15 pm
June 22, 2022 | Wednesday | Silky Otter Cinema (Christchurch) | 6:00 pm
July 3, 2022 | Sunday | The Embassy 2 (Wellington) | 12:45 pm
Available online from June 19 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

Four hundred years ago Chinese women had to obey fathers, husbands, and sons. But women in a few secluded villages of central China had a secret – a secret language they created called Nushu. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
June 17, 2022 | Friday | Silky Otter Cinemas (Auckland) | 6:00 pm
June 17, 2022 | Friday | Silky Otter Cinemas (Christchurch) | 6:00 pm
July 1, 2022 | Friday | The Embassy 2 (Wellington) | 8:00 pm
Available online from June 18 until July 10, 2022

Myanmar Diaries is built up of short films by ten young anonymous Burmese filmmakers, combined with emotionally harrowing citizen journalism documenting the junta’s brutality, as well as courageous resistance to it. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
June 19, 2022 | Sunday | The Capitol (Auckland) | 5:15 pm
June 24, 2022 | Friday | Silky Otter Cinemas (Christchurch) | 7:00 pm
July 10, 2022 | Sunday | The Roxy 1 (Wellington) | 12:15 pm
Available online from June 20 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

Singing in the Wilderness takes place in Little Well Village on the barren mountaintops of China’s southern Yunnan province. It follows the story of Ping and Sheng, two idealist young Miaos who are members of a choir. They belong to an ethnic minority who lost almost everything, including their written language because of wars with the Han (the Chinese majority) and forced migration. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
Available online from June 1 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

– Short Films –

Director Charles Dong casts his grandpa, a revolutionary of the left-wing, as the film’s lead, investigating and retracing his family saga spanning three decades of Chinese post-cultural revolution history. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
Available online from June 1 until July 10, 2022

Lin, barely 1.5 meters tall, is a young woman who drives a 10-meter truck every day. Whether it is the hardship of the long-distance journey, the misfortune of the family or the unsuccessful marriage life, none of them have changed Lin’s tenaciousness.

Screening Dates:
Available online from June 1 until July 10, 2022

Émigrés offers a brief glimpse into how an immigrant family remains comfortably estranged and elusive of its history. The “Why” might have gotten lost along the way.

Screening Dates:
Available online from June 1 until July 10, 2022

A stirring tribute told by Wu-Ching Chang about her grandmother who, as a T’ung-yang-hsi, was sold as a young girl to another family and raised as their future daughter-in-law. Forced to perform the household chores and denied an education, this hardworking woman found freedom through financial independence. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
Available online from June 1 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

A Chinese female filmmaker’s harrowing journey of enduring sexual harassment, bullying and misogyny in order to realize her filmmaking dreams in Malaysia. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
Available online from June 1 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

“The Chemical Factory” is a performative short animated documentary film that interrogates the lingering effects of the Cultural Revolution in China within the Chinese American community, linking this history to the present in terms of historical, intergenerational trauma, including the spate of anti-Asian hate crimes during the Covid 19 Pandemic. A Chinese immigrant mother recounts her experiences growing up during the tumultuous 1950’s communist China to her American son. A lost Guangzhou China is brilliantly rendered using real-time graphics hardware and software for the first time ever. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
Available online from June 1 until July 10, 2022

Trailer:

As the world’s largest Covid lockdown is announced in India, 1.3 billion people are commanded to stay home, at four hours’ notice. Trickling out of megacities are millions of migrant labourers, stranded without jobs and wages to survive another day. They are walking home to villages. Even as many will walk to their deaths, craftsman Imraan is leading the march out from Mumbai. (Doc Edge 2022)

Screening Dates:
Available online from June 1 until July 10, 2022

For more information, please visit: https://docedge.nz/