Filmmaker / Artist / Researcher
Andy Xu
BASED IN SHENZHEN / ABU DHABI / NEW YORK
The King of Medicine
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In a world where belief can be more potent than medicine, what happens when faith in tradition meets the unrelenting force of reality? King of Medicine is a darkly comedic yet deeply tragic exploration of a man caught between his past, his ambitions, and the fragile truth he has built around himself.
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The film follows Guangming Sun, a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner with a loyal following, a silver tongue, and a past he would rather forget. He is revered as a healer, a figure of wisdom, and even a descendant of the legendary "King of Medicine," but behind the ornate facade of his pharmacy, how much of his practice is real, and how much is performance?
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Blending gritty realism with stylized absurdity, King of Medicine captures the paradox of a society struggling to reconcile its ancient traditions with modern skepticism. Inspired by Chinese cinematic classics such as The Goddess (1934), King of Medicine is a character-driven, intimate portrait of deception, cultural identity, and the fine line between belief and fraud. Guangming is not a villain, nor a hero—he is a man who has spent a lifetime navigating a system that both empowers and destroys him.
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With a sharp, satirical edge and a deeply human core, King of Medicine is a film that does not provide easy answers. Instead, it lingers, leaving behind a question: What happens when the healer needs healing?
Youth Rhapsody
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Youth Rhapsody begins in the past: with archival fragments from my father’s university years — a time charged with youthful ideals, political hope, and a belief that the world could be shaped by conviction alone. His voice drifts between certainty and silence, revealing a generation that once carried its dreams with boldness but now carries them with caution.
From this inherited memory, the film moves into the present, tracing the lives of youth today through a hybrid of documentary interviews and fictionalized scenes. Friends share meals, wander campus corridors, and talk about futures they’re unsure how to reach. Nothing dramatic happens, yet everything hints at a quiet tension: what does it mean to grow up inheriting ideals that no longer feel attainable?
Blending lived conversations with imagined possibilities, the film creates a space where two generations meet without ever standing side by side. My father’s unresolved past lingers like a distant hum beneath the everyday rhythms of today’s youth.
A Maoist Muddle
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To speak and to believe—these are two different things. A Maoist Muddle is a film about the widening chasm between rhetoric and reality, between the language of revolution and the machinery of capitalism that now wears its mask.
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Set in the sanitized world of a state-run broadcast station, the film examines the contradictions of modern Chinese socialism, where Maoist slogans still hang on office walls, yet the laborers those slogans once promised to uplift are now crushed under endless work shifts and corporate efficiency metrics. What happens when ideology is no longer a force of change but a tool for justification?
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The film operates in layers: at its surface, a professional interview setting—controlled, rehearsed, carefully framed—but beneath it, something unsettled, something unsaid. The camera remains patient, the dialogue restrained, yet every pause, every glance, suggests an undercurrent of doubt. Words of sacrifice and hard work fill the air, but their meaning has already curdled.
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Inspired by Edward Yang’s social critiques Confucian's Confusions, A Maoist Muddle also lingers in discomfort, in irony, in the spaces between belief and performance, between past and a commodified present. It is not a question of whether the revolution failed, but rather whether it has been repurposed beyond recognition.
Animal Paradise
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A zoo is a place of wonder—or so we are told. Animal Paradise strips away the illusion, exposing the unsettling irony of a world where suffering is repackaged as entertainment.
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Shot in black and white with a calm, unblinking lens, the film observes rather than intervenes, letting the contrast between human delight and animal distress speak for itself. Tourists laugh, children point, cameras flash—meanwhile, behind the bars, a different reality unfolds. The zoo, branded as a sanctuary, reveals itself as a stage for quiet cruelty, where confinement and spectacle go hand in hand.
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A research-led exploration of human-nature relationships, wildlife exploitation, and tourism, the film refuses melodrama, relying instead on composition, stillness, and stark imagery to confront the viewer with an uncomfortable truth: in the theater of captivity, only one side gets to enjoy the show.
Mistake
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