Gardena Cinema

Filmed over four years in three Beijing reform schools, Reform School Students offers a striking portrait of students, families, teachers, and administrators. Filmmakers Wang Zijun and Wang Lan probe the hopes, fears, family circumstances, and complicated relationships of the young people who attend them.

Wang weaves first-person reflections, on-the-scene interviews, archival footage, and observations of everyday life into a diaristic meditation on memory, history, and home. Filmed simultaneously with Tiananmen, Notes from Beijing likewise records the Chinese capital from 1988 to 1991.

Produced for China’s first Earth Day in 1990—but never aired—Only One Earth emerged directly from the intel. Combining archival footage, poetic montage, and an unusually experimental essayistic style, the film moves between pollution, deforestation, wildlife loss, famine, and the environmental consequences of industrialization.