Isabelle Glachant

This City Is a Battlefield

Isa, a taciturn school teacher working for the resistance, is tasked with carrying out an assassination with the help of Hazil, a charming rebel who finds himself falling for Isa’s wife, Fatimah.

Shadowbox

Maya discovers that her husband – an ex-soldier who is suffering from PTSD - is the prime suspect in a murder investigation. She and her teenage son are forced to go to extremes to keep the family together.

Youth (Spring)

This film was shot between 2014 and 2019 in the town of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City in Zhejiang province, China. Zhili is home to over 18,000 privately-run workshops producing children's clothes, mostly for the domestic market, but some also for export. The workshops employ around 300,000 migrant workers, chiefly from the rural provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan and Jiangsu.

Abracadabra

A black comedy from a magician named Lukman who performs illusion magic that suddenly become real.

Chinese Portrait

Shot over the course of ten years on both film and video, the film consists of a series of carefully composed tableaux of people and environments. Pedestrians shuffle across a bustling Beijing street, steelworkers linger outside a deserted factory, tourists laugh and scamper across a crowded beach, worshippers kneel to pray in a remote village. With a painterly eye for composition, Wang captures China as he sees it, calling to a temporary halt a land in a constant state of change.

11 Flowers

A coming-of-age story set during China's Cultural Revolution. 11 year old Wang Han finds himself entangled with a fugitive and struggles to understand the adult world.

Chongqing Blues

Lin, a sea captain, returns from a 6 month journey when he is told that his 25-year-old son Lin Bo has been gunned down by the police. In his quest to understand what happened, he realizes he knew very little about his own son. He starts a journey back to Chongqin, a city he once lived. He will understand the impact of his paternal repeated absence on the life of his child.

City of Life and Death

In 1937, during the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Imperial Japanese Army has just captured Nanjing, then-capital of the Republic of China. What followed was known as the Nanking Massacre, or the Rape of Nanking, a six week period wherein tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed.

Wild Grass

Since the start of the 1990s, a period during which the Chinese government criticised the Western media for biased reporting, Chinese orphanages have strictly controlled access by the media. Because of the difficulty of gaining entrance, it is extremely difficult to know what the situation has been like there for many years. Accompanied by a mother living close to the Qingdao centre, it was thus nevertheless possible for me to film this delicate subject in privileged conditions. It was there that, in 1995, I discovered for the first time dozens of children abandoned by their parents. Over the following 10 years, I came back to visit them every year, and I became their friend. As I listened to them relating their dreams of glory, I filmed their evolution over a decade...

In Love We Trust

A divorced couple learns that the only way to possibly save their daughter, who is suffering from blood cancer, is to have another child. The problem is they've both already remarried.

The Love of Mr. An

Mr. An is almost 90 years old. He loves life, dance and the smiling young Xiao Wei, his daily life companion. His wife, secluded at home, is quite unhappy about this friendly and love relationship. Xiao Wei’s husband doesn’t seem to care. One morning Mr. An get sick and has to be hospitalized. Xiao Wei start to wonder if she shouldn’t end the relationship.

My Neighbours and Their Japanese Ghosts

The elderly are interviewed on the memories they have on the Japanese soldiers who occupied China in the late ‘30s. Some remembered, some didn’t, but the result is an endearing chronicle of what we choose to live with in the old age.

I Come From Ikotun

Four years ago, Kingsley arrived from Nigeria in Guangzhou, China and shared a small room with other Africans in the basement of a commercial building. He converted this modest space into a barber’s shop. Kingsley is keen to start an import and export company and to register it officially in Guangzhou. He works every day until 11 pm then goes to sleep in a chair at McDonald’s. He must also send money to his wife, so despite all his efforts, he is still unable to put aside enough money to register his business. In mid-November 2019, he goes back to Lagos to renew his visa. There, he and his wife rent a small stall in the Ikotun Market in the suburbs. But business is hard. Early in 2020, Kingsley is due to head back to China to continue his quest, but with all travel blocked by the Covid-19 epidemic, he remains stuck in Nigeria. Meanwhile, in Guangzhou, the director meets Evelyn, a Nigerian woman, trying to survive with her 6-year-old daughter and with another one on the way.