Directing

Yi Cui

Acting credits

Behind the camera

She Recognized the Storm: Xiao Hong and Her Golden Era poster
7.3

Documentary on the ups and downs of the female writer Xiao Hong's life experience, her works, her love and the golden era she lived in.

She Recognized the Storm: Xiao Hong and Her Golden Era

2014

Of Shadows poster
5.0

Set in the unique landscape of China's Loess Plateau, Of Shadows captures the liveliness and resilience of a group of local shadow play artists navigating between the rural staging of ancient plays and the urban spectacle of national cultural heritage.

Of Shadows

2016

Through The Looking Glass poster
NR

On a high-land Tibetan pasture, a screening event unfolds quietly. Monks, herdsmen and their families gather by the screen to observe life captured through their own lenses.

Through The Looking Glass

2017

Late Summer poster
NR

Late Summer captures a centuries-old Beijing theatre in its incarnation as a modern-day transient space.

Late Summer

2017

No artwork available
NR

Through the use of an optical printer as a creative device, the individual frame is played like a music note. A rhythmic improvisation visualized on celluloid.

Shadow Puppet

2010

To Alexandra poster
2.0

Through text, researcher-writer Alexandra David-Néel’s journey across the Himalayas a century ago unfolds via her letters home—seeking answers in a world fractured by colonial entanglements, wars, and human ferocity. In audiovisual spaces, the filmmaker's experiences in eastern Tibet are reflected via her own lens and those of native Tibetan people. What begins through her encounter with a legendary school in the region becomes, by the film’s completion, an elegy — as violence eclipses “history”, yet fails to erase memory. Meandering between past and present, the work invites viewers into a meditative space open to contemplations on life, death, history, remembrance, the self, and more.

To Alexandra

2025

No artwork available
NR

"Screening from Within" juxtaposes the historical trajectories of the Chinese adoption of the Soviet “cinefication” movement and the contemporary transformations of itinerant film projection in China. Migrant workers of Beijing and Chengdu, rural inhabitants of Anhui, Sichuan and the Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, as well as projectionists from today and yesterday, share their thoughts, memory and experience about government and NGO-sponsored film screenings. Many of them remember the times when itinerant screening attracted huge crowds of viewers. Others—the younger ones—take video cameras in their own hands to film “from within.”

Screening from Within

2018