The best Wang Hongwei’s movies on YouTube

Four independent stories set in modern China about random acts of violence.

A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.

Five thought-provoking shorts imagine what Hong Kong will be like ten years from now. In Extras, two genial low-level gangsters are hired to stage an attack, but they’re mere sacrificial lambs in a political conspiracy. Rebels strive to preserve destroyed homes and objects as specimens in the mesmerizing Season of the End. In Dialect, a taxi driver struggles to adjust after Putonghua displaces Cantonese as Hong Kong’s only official language. Following the death of a leading independence activist, an act of self-immolation outside the British consulate triggers questions and protests in the searing yet moving Self-Immolator. In Local Egg, a grocery shop owner worries about his son’s youth guard activities and where to buy eggs after Hong Kong’s last chicken farm closes down.

Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns to the shooting locations of his films, along with his actors, friends and close collaborators. Jia recalls the inspiration sources for his movies, such as Platform, Still Life and A Touch of Sin. The film is the memory of a filmmaker and of a country in convulsion, China, which reveals itself little by little.

When a drunk passenger distracts him, cabbie Lao Shi collides with a motorist on a scooter. Amid concern that the young man will die before the ambulance arrives, Shi transports him to the hospital. But when insurance information is not located for the victim, now in a coma, Shi gets stuck with the hospital bills. So begins a sequence of personal hardship, as Shi is pushed to the brink of destitution by a system of bureaucratic indifference. Soon, he's forced to make an unthinkable decision. The outcome will be life or death.