Ma Xiang is fourteen years old and lives with his family in Hualong in the Chinese province of Quinghai. They belong to the so-called Hui Chinese who, unlike the Han Chinese majority of the country, consider themselves Muslims. At school Ma Xiang recites the Koran and visits the mosque. But in order to work off his father’s debts, he is sent to a far away city he doesn’t know, where his uncle Ma Yusuf operates several noodle restaurants. He is to be trained as a noodle puller. Life and work in the strange city are hard, Ma Xiang is badly paid and Islam is frowned upon. He is forced not only to take off his takke, his traditional hat, but also his glasses, because Ma Yusuf thinks that wearing glasses and making noodles are incompatible.

Huo Ning follows Ma Xiang’s journey which is also a journey to adulthood. The important thing is to find one’s place within an extremely patriarchal system and at the same time preserve one’s independence. Because Ma Xiang, whom we already got to know as a sensitive boy at the beginning of “Noodle Kid”, isn’t easily dominated. Too unbroken is his self-awareness, which also includes the desire to make contact with his mother who left Ma Xiang’s family many years ago.

Carolin Weidner

Whales pulling little submarines and whole palaces borne in the air by hot air balloons traverse urban canyons to electronic sounds. The animated drawings from the 19th and 20th century invite us to marvel and tell us how the people in the past imagined our present. Will our ideas of the future also look so quaint later?

Marie-Thérèse Antony

The metropolis looms in the night. No people, just scattered lights, sounds of cars, murmuring. A resolute woman talks of the good old days, while two young students are looking for their identity and place in this complex world. Even in the opening tracking shot, Stephan Knauss’s documentary illustrates a Chinese metropolis in transition. Between concrete desert and nature, old and young, tradition and departure, beats and emotion – always on the lookout.

Julia Weigl