Screening

Little Boat organises independent screenings as a complement to mainstream cinemas and major film festivals in China, bringing lesser-seen works to local audiences. Each event is also a gathering point for the film community, a space where viewers can meet and share their passion for cinema beyond the screen.

2026

Little Boat 2nd Anniversary Screening

For our second anniversary, Little Boat gathers four films that trace the spirit of feminist cinema and the women's movement. Varda's One Sings, the Other Doesn't follows a decade of friendship and emancipation; Chytilová's Something Different sets an athlete against a housewife; and the camera turns on itself in Delphine and Carole and Be Pretty and Shut Up!, where actresses and activists seize the means of representation. Together they form a portrait of women looking, speaking, and refusing to stay silent.

Queer Panorama

A program devoted to queer cinema across geographies and generations. These films explore desire, identity, and the intimate worlds that mainstream narratives often overlook, tracing how queerness shapes the way we look, love, and remember. Together, they form a constellation of voices.

Unwelcome Friend - Part One: Moscow's Last Breath

Unwelcome Friend - Part One: Moscow's Last Breath immerses viewers in a city at a crossroads. The film captures Moscow in a state of flux: its political tensions, cultural contradictions, and the fraying bonds between people navigating an uncertain present. At once observational and deeply personal, it asks what it means to belong to a place that may no longer want you.

2025

Independent Chinese Documentary Screening

Three independent documentaries that turn their cameras toward lives rarely seen on Chinese screens. Shanghai Youth captures the restless energy of a generation navigating urban transformation; The Interceptor From My Hometown contemplates the weight of silence and ritual; and Born in Beijing follows years of ordinary citizens seeking justice through China's petitioning system.

Evenki Trilogy by Gu Tao

Filmmaker Gu Tao spent years living among the Evenki people of China's northeastern forests, resulting in this intimate trilogy. Aoluguya observes a reindeer-herding community uprooted by modernization; Yuguo and His Mother follows a young man caught between ancestral traditions and contemporary drift; and The Last Moose of Aoluguya chronicles a hunter-artist's defiant, self-destructive freedom.

Gena Rowlands through the Lens of John Cassavetes

This triple feature celebrates one of cinema's most extraordinary collaborations: director John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands. In Faces, Rowlands electrifies a portrait of marital disintegration; Opening Night finds her as an actress unraveling under the pressure of performance and aging; and A Woman Under the Influence delivers a shattering study of a wife and mother pushed to her psychological limits.

Czech New Wave Screening

This program surveys the daring spirit of the Czechoslovak New Wave, a movement that flourished briefly in the 1960s before being crushed by political repression. From Forman's sly social satire The Firemen's Ball to Němec's surreal resistance in Diamonds of the Night, from Chytilová's anarchic Daisies to Menzel's bittersweet Larks on a String, these films share a defiant wit and formal inventiveness.

Youth Trilogy by Wang Bing

Wang Bing's monumental Youth trilogy follows the lives of young migrant workers in the textile workshops of Zhili, Zhejiang. Shot over five years, the three films patiently observe their long hours, fragile romances, labor disputes, and journeys home.

Little Boat Anniversary Screening

To celebrate Little Boat's anniversary, we present four films by two radical voices in European cinema: Chantal Akerman and Claire Denis. Akerman's Je tu il elle and La Captive explore desire, obsession, and the slippery boundaries of selfhood, while Denis's Beau Travail and Trouble Every Day plunge into bodies governed by discipline and hunger.

Japanese Film Showcase

Three films spanning nearly a century of Japanese cinema, united by their sharp, idiosyncratic visions of human nature. Imamura Shōhei's Vengeance Is Mine dissects a real-life serial killer with cold, unflinching precision; Yamanaka Sadao's Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo spins a warm, humanist comedy around a one-eyed, one-armed ronin and an unassuming pot hiding a fortune; and Igarashi Kōhei's Super Happy Forever quietly traces a grieving return.

Vagabond Trilogy by Xu Tong

Xu Tong's trilogy ventures into the margins of Chinese society with unflinching intimacy. Wheat Harvest follows a sex worker navigating rural and urban worlds; Fortune Teller portrays a blind fortune teller and his disabled wife surviving on society's edge; and Shattered captures an aging man's stubborn vitality amid poverty and family fractures.

Dreamlands and Otherworlds

Four films that drift between waking and dreaming, between the everyday and the sublime. From Lynch's hallucinatory landscapes to Tarkovsky's prophetic stillness, from Maya Deren's surreal poem to Sean Price Williams's restless American picaresque, this program traces the porous frontiers where reality bends.

Jonas Mekas: Glimpses of Beauty

A single, sprawling work by Lithuanian-American filmmaker Jonas Mekas, assembled from over thirty years of personal home movies. Fragments of family, friends, weather, and light gather without chronology.

2024

La Flor by Mariano Llinas

A fourteen-hour cinematic odyssey by Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinas, performed by four actresses across six wildly different stories. La Flor unfolds as a flower of genres - spy thrillers, melodrama, musical, silent film - bound together by the same faces moving through impossible worlds.

Wanda by Barbara Loden

Barbara Loden's only feature, written, directed, and performed by herself, follows a working-class woman drifting through the coal country of Pennsylvania. Quiet, unsentimental, and unmistakably American, Wanda is a landmark of independent cinema and a portrait of female solitude unlike any other.

Soviet Cinema Screening

Two masterworks of late-Soviet cinema, both meditations on memory, faith, and the bonds of kinship. Tarkovsky's autobiographical Mirror weaves dream, history, and childhood into one of the most personal films ever made; Parajanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors transforms Carpathian folk life into a delirious, color-saturated lament.

Ingmar Bergman: Three Studies of Intimacy

Three of Ingmar Bergman's most piercing examinations of family, marriage, and the inner life. Cries and Whispers stages a sister's slow death in chambers of red and white; Scenes from a Marriage anatomizes a coupling and its unraveling; Autumn Sonata reopens the wounds between a mother and her grown daughters.

A Night of Knowing Nothing

Payal Kapadia's haunting hybrid documentary listens to a young woman in India writing letters to her absent lover, her words drifting over images of campus protest and state violence. A film of insomnia, longing, and political awakening, it speaks softly of how love and resistance share the same restless night.

Chantal Akerman: Time, Solitude, Travel

Two essential works by Chantal Akerman that map the architecture of female solitude. Jeanne Dielman, her radical masterpiece, observes three days in the life of a Brussels widow as her routines slowly fracture; The Meetings of Anna follows a filmmaker through trains and hotels across Europe, an itinerary of detached encounters.

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