Superstition and Cruelty: Xu Tong's Fortune Teller

Li Baicheng and his wife Pearl in Xu Tong's Fortune Teller.

Anyone living in major cities like Beijing or Shanghai is aware of the gaping chasm that exists between urban and rural life in China, but that doesn't make being confronted with the inequalities any less shocking. Xu Tong's new documentary Fortune Teller, screened recently at Beijing's Ullen's Center for Contemporary Art, delves into China's lower depths by spending a year with a crippled itinerant fortune teller and his deaf, mute, mentally impaired wife as they move around Hebei Province in China's north. The film is every bit as grueling as this description implies.

The Tribulations of Chinese Rural Life: Huang Mei's The Village Elementary

While many things have improved in the People's Republic since the death of Mao in 1976, access to public education for the poor isn't one of them. I recently saw The Village Elementary, a documentary by Huang Mei, that delves into this issue with a portrait of life in a tiny village primary school in Gansu Province, west China. This arid, mountainous region features breathtaking  scenery, but harbours villages so impoverished its hard to believe they exist in the same nation as the glittering skylines of modern cities like Shanghai and Beijing.