Key themes and sentiments of the series are: China, youth, pain, hope, migration, home, education, work, reality, and dream. Co-curated by LCC Professor Qi Wang and Linda Dubler of the High Museum, the films are selected from “the increasingly prominent corpus of independent Chinese cinema.” The curators write that, “Through them we hope to offer a brief yet fruitful insight in Chinese society today, as updated within the past decade, and to try together to understand and perhaps share the country's changes, charms, and challenges as experienced and contemplated by the Chinese, not only as groups but also as individuals.”

The three films are: Last Train Home (April 2, 8pm), a documentary by Canadian-Chinese filmmaker, Lixin Fan, about the largest human migration on earth as seen through the experience of two of the 130 million Chinese workers traveling home for the annual lunar New Year. In Senior Year (April 9, 8pm), Zhou Hao illuminates the extreme anxiety of Chinese teenagers preparing for the national college entrance exams that will determine their destiny. This film may generate special interest because of the recent ‘Superior Chinese Tiger Mother’ controversy. Suzhou River (April 16, 8pm), is a modern noir film whose stylistic virtuosity reflects the “watery channel that runs through Shanghai” and takes its narrative framework form Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo . All films are subtitled in English.