Awards & Festivals

“I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bicycle”.

Genre:
Run Time: 85 min
Director: Nick Torrens
Country: China
Year: 2014

Frame !ndependent presents this absorbing documentary about the changing face of China by award-winning director Nick Torrens.

“Torrens’ film is far more nuanced and complex than much of the simplistic documentary work on China produced in the West-a result of the many years he spent on the project, and the three China-related films he made before this one”. Dan Edwards, REALTIME.

Both intriguing and confrontational the film takes us deep inside the present dilemmas and dreams of China’s people without mediation from Western presenters or narrators. Featuring rare archive and extraordinary testimony from former Red Guards and Rebels, the film is a powerful parable of China in the twenty-first century.

It's very powerful.. Torrens’ work is so valuable, helping record lives in trying times, and making people search in their souls to find meanings and calling’- Li Xin, Managing Editor, China Wall Street Journal.

Synopsis

From a thousand year old village in Southwest China, a young woman searching for a meaningful existence is led deep into China’s hidden history, a fractured line that runs just beneath the surface of modern day contemporary life. Her emotional discovery throws into question her own images of her country’s past.

Once China’s citizens dreamed of “a watch, a bicycle and a radio”. Today they strive for wealth and a better life, often to the detriment of family and tradition. Young people create their own life path inspired by three new dreams: The dream of the present, to make China rich and powerful, the dream of the future, to find a personally better life; and the almost-impossible dream of the past, the dream of meaningful existence. The generation gap widens as grandparents are reluctant to speak of their experiences during the Cultural Revolution and grandchildren are only concerned with material gains, saying, “I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bicycle”.

10 years in the making and featuring rare archive and powerful personal testimony from former Red Guards, China’s 3 Dreams opens the door on the past and questions its impact on the present.