Icarus Films: Disorder

Disorder: (Xianshi Shi Guoqu de Weilai)

From The dGenerate Films Collection

Directed by HUANG Weikai

58 minutes / Color
English; Mandarin / English subtitles
Release: 2012
Copyright: 2009

Urban Planning and Design

Documentary - Expository

Disorder and Floating are included on one DVD.

Huang Weikai's one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China's major cities today. As urbanization in China advances at a breakneck pace, Chinese cities teeter on the brink of mayhem. One man dances in the middle of traffic while another attempts to jump from a bridge before dozens of onlookers. Pigs run wild on a highway while dignitaries swim in a polluted river. Unshowable on China's heavily controlled television networks, Disorder reveals an emerging underground media, one that has the potential to truly capture the ground-level upheaval of Chinese society.

Huang Weikai collects footage from a dozen amateur videographers and weaves them into a unique symphony of urban social dysfunction. Huang shatters and reconstructs a world that's barely comprehensible, though with palpable energy - vibrant, dangerous, and terrifying.

"Several [films] have caught the chaos of rapidly industrialized China, but none is as raw or terrifying as this."—Glenn Sumi, Now Toronto

"One of the most mesmerizing films I've seen in ages."—Hua Hsu, The Atlantic

"Lurid, voyeuristic and surreal, suggesting a cross between the work of the New York tabloid photographer Weegee, whose oeuvre was first collected as NAKED CITY, and the mother of all sensational documentaries, MONDO CANE."—J. Hoberman, The New York Times