Zhang Han Wen

Shot on Super 16mm film, We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire examines the area of Yu Garden located in Shanghai Old Town, which is currently undergoing a massive urban renewal. Following a female character dressed in red with a kerosene lamp, the camera captures the unsettling and haunting scene of the empty neighborhood with little lighting after residents were dispatched to the suburb. Meanwhile, the VO narrates the local history of an urban grass-roots uprising that happened nearly two hundred years ago…

Hostile Landscapes is a two-channel film revolving around the remarkable true story of Ju Hyeongeon (朱贤健/주현건/Zhu Xianjian), a North Korean defector who was imprisoned in Jilin Prison, Northeast China, since 2013, for illegal border-crossing, theft, and robbery. In October 2021, Ju escaped the prison with bare hands and managed to elude local police and authorities for 40 days before he was ultimately captured near the Fengman Dam, a historically significant location with deep Japanese colonial ties.

Haunted by post-socialist nostalgia, 25-year-old director Hanwen Zhang returns to the cement-factory town in northeast China in which he was born and raised. The town’s official name is Sheep Pen Town, in the Shuangyang District of Changchun City, Jilin Province. People don’t really use this name, but currently refer to it as ‘the cement factory’. According to oral history, the town was known in the 1990s as ‘the first line of China’. Throughout the film, the director explores this clue to reveal a half-buried story. The town was a product of China’s rapid and radical industrialisation in the 1980s, having been constructed simultaneously with a state-owned cement factory to house the workers who migrated there. With a subtle irony and a nuanced but brave approach, Hanwen explores the history of his country and its ideology through the lenses of his own family and hometown.

Shot on Super 16mm film, We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire examines the area of Yu Garden located in Shanghai Old Town, which is currently undergoing a massive urban renewal. Following a female character dressed in red with a kerosene lamp, the camera captures the unsettling and haunting scene of the empty neighborhood with little lighting after residents were dispatched to the suburb. Meanwhile, the VO narrates the local history of an urban grass-roots uprising that happened nearly two hundred years ago…

Hostile Landscapes is a two-channel film revolving around the remarkable true story of Ju Hyeongeon (朱贤健/주현건/Zhu Xianjian), a North Korean defector who was imprisoned in Jilin Prison, Northeast China, since 2013, for illegal border-crossing, theft, and robbery. In October 2021, Ju escaped the prison with bare hands and managed to elude local police and authorities for 40 days before he was ultimately captured near the Fengman Dam, a historically significant location with deep Japanese colonial ties.

Haunted by post-socialist nostalgia, 25-year-old director Hanwen Zhang returns to the cement-factory town in northeast China in which he was born and raised. The town’s official name is Sheep Pen Town, in the Shuangyang District of Changchun City, Jilin Province. People don’t really use this name, but currently refer to it as ‘the cement factory’. According to oral history, the town was known in the 1990s as ‘the first line of China’. Throughout the film, the director explores this clue to reveal a half-buried story. The town was a product of China’s rapid and radical industrialisation in the 1980s, having been constructed simultaneously with a state-owned cement factory to house the workers who migrated there. With a subtle irony and a nuanced but brave approach, Hanwen explores the history of his country and its ideology through the lenses of his own family and hometown.