NEXTDoc Film Festival is initiated by a group of young returnees from U.S. with rich experience of living overseas and being exposed to different cultures. NEXTDoc focuses on projects about cross-cultural stories and is dedicated to bringing documentary films from different cultures to its audience.

JIDANNI 

“This was my first individual work . I went to a remote mountain on my own to live with a special person that I met on Coughsurfing. I tried to experience his life in every aspect so that I can know him deeply and made a documentary of his life and his positive but odd viewpoints of his life. He came from America, and has a bachelor degree of Geography and a master degree of Computer in Northwestern University, however, he have lived in the mountains for 17 years in Tai Wan. He is a transgender and proficient in Chinese, wireless, gender study, botany. He is alone living a primitive life. In this footage I try to know his life and what does he think of life. Let’s see in this 15 minutes’ documentary film” – Claire Qian, the director of the documentary

Today, did you do your service?

In Hong Kong’s universities, it’s easy to find posters about the service groups that recruit university students and send them back to rural lands in Mainland China to do volunteering service. The service groups hope to let the university students learn things out of the class. Meanwhile, the organizers want the youths from universities to communicate with local children and encourage them to work harder to enter the world outside of their living place. The wish is pretty meaningful, but do the university students actually reach the goal during their service trip?

Floating Life

In 2015 ,”North of the city market” in Beijing appeals lots of attention. This story mainly about a lonely old man, a naughty mischievous boy, two people from stranger to friend. The old man has a Steamed Buns shop in the north of the city market, now facing demolition. Every day to repeat the monotonous life, until the little boy appeared to let him feel the good Lord Sun emotion. Boy’s parents are busy of working, so he do not want to go back home. In the end of this film, we recorded some real materials.

GRADUATION

Graduation is based on a true story. Zhang Han is an international student in Purdue University, and she faced lots of challenges during her last year in Purdue. Han wants to stay in the U.S. after graduating, but her dream graduate school rejected her. After that, she began to apply jobs, but she found that it’s too hard for internationalstudents to find a job in the U.S., because of the lack of internship experience in the U.S., also the H1B visa. Han is not the only one faced those problem, many international students faced those problems during the last year in college. Students in the movie share their experience with audience, analysis the value of study aboard, and give their suggestions for the students who face the same situation.

Chinese Immigrant Families in Gainesville ( Language Culture and Identity) 

During my graduate study at the University of Florida, I’ve interacted with many ABC (American Born Chinese) friends. I’ve noticed that most of them speak English much better than Chinese. Only a few of them can speak Chinese fluently. More interestingly, when they introduce themselves to me, they will say: “I am American, but my parents are from China”, most of the time. So, I can tell that there is a clear difference between their perceptions of social identities and their parents’. Therefore, this documentary is meant to explore the relationships between the 1st and 2nd generation of Chinese immigrant families and how 1st generation parents pass on Chinese language and culture to the 2nd generation, revealing the conflicts in perceiving social identities between these two  generations.

50RMB, 40RMB (Members)