Media

11.04.25

ChinaFile Presents: ‘Made in Ethiopia’

Filmed over four years of intensive interviews and unique access, Made in Ethiopia lifts the curtain on China’s historic but misunderstood impact on Africa, and explores contemporary Ethiopia at a moment of profound crisis. The film throws audiences...

‘Mistress Dispeller’

Susan Jakes & Elizabeth Lo
The new documentary feature film Mistress Dispeller probes the unraveling and redemption of a marriage at breathtakingly close range. Director Elizbeth Lo follows Teacher Wang, a professional “mistress dispeller,” as she counsels a middle-aged wife...

Media

06.30.25

ChinaFile Presents: ‘How to Have an American Baby’

Leslie Tai & Susan Jakes
Following a screening of How to Have an American Baby at Asia Society on June 25, filmmaker Leslie Tai joined ChinaFile Editor-in-Chief Susan Jakes to talk about the film and her process of making of it. The film reveals the hidden world of Chinese...

The Making of an American Baby

Leslie Tai & Susan Jakes
On June 25, ChinaFile will screen Leslie Tai’s documentary film How to Have an American Baby, which explores the industry built to promote Chinese women traveling to the U.S. to give birth to children so that they can be American citizens. ChinaFile...

Depth of Field

05.15.20

‘A Letter to My Friend under Quarantine in Wuhan’

Ye Ming, Yan Cong & more from Yuanjin Photo
Highlighting Chinese visual storytellers’ coverage of COVID-19 inside China. Some of these storytellers were on the ground documenting the experience of residents and medical workers in Wuhan, the city where the virus first emerged. Other...

Culture

03.23.18

What Chinese High School Students Learn in America

Jonathan Landreth
In 2011, when a rural prep school in Maine invited New York-based director Miao Wang to screen her first film, Beijing Taxi, she was surprised to find so many Chinese students enrolled at the archetypal New England establishment. Not Chinese-...

“We Could All Be Potential Refugees”: Ai Weiwei on the Epic Journey Of “Human Flow”

Gary M. Kramer
Salon
Ai shot 900 hours of footage and conducted 600 interviews over the course of a year, and edited the film over six months.

Two Movies China Desperately Wants to Hide

Jeff Jacoby
Boston Globe
In China, prisoners of conscience are literally being butchered. These films take a look inside China's organ harvesting market.

Culture

06.29.16

Using Free Sex to Expose Sexual Abuse in China

Jonathan Landreth
Nanfu Wang hoped that a woman called Ye Haiyan (“Hooligan Sparrow”), who had offered free sex on the Internet to draw attention to the plight of poor women selling their bodies to support their children, would lead her to the prostitutes she wanted...

Media

03.29.16

‘River Town’ the Movie

Jonathan Landreth from China Film Insider
Not since Iron and Silk premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991 has a movie based on a memoir about teachers on the front lines of U.S.-China relations come to the big screen. Director Shirley Sun’s mostly-English-language film adaptation of...

A Bold New Instagram Collaboration Offers Fresh Eyes on China

Emily Rauhala
Washington Post
The Eyes on China Project, a bold new collaboration between foreign and Chinese photographers, aims to broaden that view by bringing you photography, and photographers, that might not otherwise make it over the Great Firewall.