

Around China with a Movie Camera
Take a trip back to China in the first half of the twentieth Century with this presentation of extraordinary, rare and beautiful travelogues, newsreels and home movies.
Genres
Overview
A new film compiled from the BFI National Archive's unparalleled holdings of early films of China, features films from 1900-48 filmed across China. The cinematic journey of Around China with a Movie Camera contains many films which may never have been seen in China, or at the very least not for over 70 years. These travelogues, newsreels and home movies were made by a diverse group of British and French filmmakers, some professionals, but mainly enthusiastic amateurs, including intrepid tourists, colonial-era expatriates and Christian missionaries.
Details
Budget
$0
Revenue
$0
Runtime
68 min
Release Date
2016-07-18
Status
Released
Original Language
English
Vote Count
2
Vote Average
4.2
5.0
Stuttgart Shanghai
A young pair from Stuttgart fly to Shanghai to hop aboard the textile business of his father while she prepares for the birth of their son. A story about the ever more common movement of Germans into the East for professional gain.
2007-03-01 | en
7.5
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.
1927-09-23 | de
0.0
Plant of Ford Motor Company - Antwerp
Short documentary on the Antwerp Ford Motor Company plant.
1948-01-01 | en
0.0
The Great Wall: Lovers at the Brink
In the twilight years of the Cultural Revolution, a Chinese filmmaker slowly becoming blind tours the country screening her last film to peasants. In it, the woman imagines two "alien" lovers walking from end-to-end along the Great Wall to join each other in the middle, one last time. This documentary is an adaptation of Ulay and Marina Abramovic's final collaborative project, the 1988 performance "The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk."
1989-01-01 | en
7.1
Nanook of the North
This pioneering documentary film depicts the lives of the indigenous Inuit people of Canada's northern Quebec region. Although the production contains some fictional elements, it vividly shows how its resourceful subjects survive in such a harsh climate, revealing how they construct their igloo homes and find food by hunting and fishing. The film also captures the beautiful, if unforgiving, frozen landscape of the Great White North, far removed from conventional civilization.
1922-06-11 | en
7.8
Laurel & Hardy: Their Lives and Magic
The lives of Stan Laurel (1890-1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892-1957), on the screen and behind the curtain. The joy and the sadness, the success and the failure. The story of one of the best comic duos of all time: a lesson on how to make people laugh.
2011-12-28 | de
6.0
How Animated Cartoons Are Made
Wallace Carlson walks viewers through the production of an animated short at Bray Studios.
1919-09-06 | en
5.5
One Second in Montreal
A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.
1969-09-25 | en
6.4
All in My Family
After starting a family of his very own in the United States, a gay filmmaker documents his loving, traditional Chinese family's process of acceptance.
2019-05-03 | en
7.6
Barry Humphries at the BBC
Alex Jones looks back at the highlights of Barry’s career on a selection of BBC shows, featuring some of Barry’s funniest, rudest and most revealing moments from over the decades.
2023-05-28 | en
6.0
North China Factory
This documentary from 1980 depicts a factory community in China where over 6000 workers process, spin and weave raw cotton into 90 million yards of high-quality cloth per year. Also seen are the workers' residential, social, recreational and educational facilities, all located on factory property. The film presents an engrossing study of a lifestyle that is very different from that of the Western world.
1980-01-01 | en
5.3
Famous T & A
A collection of nude and/or topless scenes from various films featuring actresses who were either famous at the time or who became famous later on.
1982-01-01 | en
0.0
The Road to Fame
China's top drama academy stages the American musical "Fame," China's first official collaboration with Broadway, as the graduation showcase for its senior class. During the eight-month rehearsal, five students compete for roles, struggle with pressure from family and authority, and prepare to graduate into China's corrupt entertainment industry.
2013-06-12 | en
7.0
From 3 to 22
A movie follows a regular working day of a woman who works in a factory. She wakes up at 3am and goes to sleep at 10pm.
1966-11-23 | sh
0.0
Mad About English!
The amazing story of 1,000,000,000 people and their MAD MAD MAD rush to learn English! China 's love affair with the English language has reached feverish proportions. With half a million or more visitors descending on Beijing for the Games, can the Chinese pull it off with their newly-acquired English? Mad About English! follows the inspiring and heart-warming efforts of a city preparing to host the world by learning a once-forbidden tongue.
2008-01-01 | en
10.0
Trip to Asia: The Quest for Harmony
Journey with the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic and their conductor Sir Simon Rattle on a breakneck concert tour of six metropolises across Asia: Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Taipei and Tokyo. Their artistic triumph onstage belies a dynamic and dramatic life backstage. The orchestra is a closed society that observes its own laws and traditions, and in the words of one of its musicians is, “an island, a democratic microcosm – almost without precedent in the music world - whose social structure and cohesion is not only founded on a common love for music but also informed by competition, compulsion and the pressure to perform to a high pitch of excellence... .” Never before has the Berlin Philharmonic allowed such intimate and exclusive access into its private world.
2008-02-28 | de
0.0
The Pharmacy: Shanghai
Joris Ivens and wife Marceline Loridan took their cameras into Pharmacy No. 3 in Shanghai, which in addition to dispensing drugs manages an outreach program of medical services, an extension of the pharmacy’s in-house medical care center.
1976-03-10 | fr
6.9
Plastic China
This film tells a story about an unschooled 11-year-old girl Yi-Jie, she's a truly global child who learns the world through the United Nations of Wastes while working with her YI minority parents in this recycle workshop thousand miles away from their mountain village home town
2017-01-20 | zh
0.0
Draussen bleiben
2007-10-24 | de
3.0
R. F. Outcault Making a Sketch of Buster and Tige
Buster Brown creater R.F. Outcault sketches his creation. Part of the Buster Brown series for Edison film studio.
1904-03-12 | en