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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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