Boomtown Beijing
This is a documentary that I directed while I was a visiting lecturer at the Beijing Film Academy. My students helped produce it. Here is the synopsis:
Boomtown Beijing is a film about the city of Beijing, its people and their dreams the summer before the Olympics.
The 2008 Olympics Games is China’s debutante ball on the world stage. “ Faster. Higher. Stronger” — the preparation for the Games has turned Beijing into a hot spot of frenzied growth. A 11 year old boy wants to beat the odds to become an Olympics torch-bearer. A road sweeper dreams of staging his own mass Olympics countdown performance. An aging blind athlete makes one last stab at a Paralympics medal before he retires from sports. Together, their stories and scenes of everyday life give a snapshot of Beijing the summer before the big games come to town.
Read a news story about the film here.
