'RIPPLES'  -  October 2021 - Feature documentary 28 minutes - Film Rights available worldwide This film  was co-directed by French director Benoit Lelievre and Chinese director Jin Huaqing. The filming team went deep into the international city Yiwu in southeastern China and recorded the daily lives of four Xinjiang women from a delicate perspective. Under the objective and calm lens, the characters present a simple and true appearance, they could represent the t...

A gentle but gorgeously photographed short documentary, QUIETLY seems to offer some correctives to current tales of social or humanitarian injustices within the vast lands of China. A handful of artlessly handled interviews with hard-working women from the distant province of Xinjiang  reveal a country  where the traditional and contemporary ways of life seem to blend smoothly, even successfully. A dutiful daughter is packing cotton for despatch, picked in the enormous fiel...

Prague, Czech Republic-On October 22, 2021, the Prague Film Festival Awards Ceremony was held online. The film RIPPLES won "Best  Documentary Short  Film" and the  "Audience Award", it was screened on the online platform of the Festival, attracting a large audience, one of the comments described it as  "a magnifying glass to see the real life in Xinjiang, China". A few days later the film won Grand Jury Prize at the Amsterdam International Fil...

Benoit Lelievre: director Huaqing Jin:  co-director   Ripples is a documentary short that focuses on how trade restrictions on cotton from Xinjiang since 2020 has affected four women who have lived in Yiwu, China for the past several years. They were born in Xinjiang and moved to Yiwu and with of their families run their own business. In their stories they express a longing for Xinjiang and its natural resources, an autonomous region in China where 80% of the country&...

RIPPLES  by Benoit Lelievre offers a cogent interpretation of their lifes by some women who have spent several years in  Yiwu City in the Zhejiang Province of China settling there coming from the  landlocked  Xinjiang autonomous Uyghur province where Uyghurs and Han Chinese live together. Also popular as a foreign tourist destination  it has lately drawn international  media attention to its  cotton industry boycott  by some Western  countries.&nbs...

RIPPLES is film about Muslim women of Xinjiang, who now live in Yiwu, and how they miss their homeland. While China is universally acknowledged as a military and economic super-power, prejudices and misconceptions about the country’s internal matters abound. One such contentious issue is the plight of the Uyghur (Uighur) Muslims, who form a large part of the population of its Xinjiang province, in the north-west, an autonomous region, like Tibet. It is bordered by the Chinese province...

Ripples peeks inside the hem of Yiwu to Xinjiang China’s cotton production circuit Reviewed by Quendrith Johnson “You know brands such as H&M, all those famous marks use Xinjiang cotton. Now Xinjiang cotton cannot go to foreign countries,” explains Amani Shahan in RIPPLES, a 27-minute short film exploration currently on the film festival circuit. From co-directors Benoit Lelievre and Huaqing Jin, this documentary subject peeks into the lives of those families ...