Badlands Film Group was founded by Yang Xiao and Chen Sisi as a doc duo in 2020. Their works focus on the activities and memories of marginalized communities, striving to explore the aesthetics of resistance behind them. For example, THE MEMO documents the video activism of migrant laborers during the Shanghai lockdown period, while THE MOUNTAINS SINGS focuses on the tradition of improvised singing by Zhuang people in the midst of ecological changes.
YANG Xiao and CHEN Sisi
CHEN sisi
CHEN Sisi, who currently works and lives in Guangzhou, is active in art film creation and production as a producer, director, assistant director, coordinator, and editor. She and Yang Xiao co-founded the "Badlands Film Group," which won the Best Documentary Short Film Award at the 60th Golden Horse Awards. The group's main works include The Memo (2023) and The Mountains Sing (2021). Her main production credits include the documentary short 14 Paintings, the narrative feature The Silent Ghost, and the narrative short A Short Dream. Additionally, she has co-initiated an image relay experiment with artists, attempting decentralized collective image creation, with the result Dreams for Awakening exhibited at the 2022 Shanghai Bund Art Museum's "Good Life" special exhibition. Her creative pursuits extend beyond filmmaking to photography and writing, with street observation being one of her notable skills.
YANG Xiao
YANG Xiao navigates between being an artist and a filmmaker, fiction and non-fiction, individual and collective roles, exploring the vibrant possibilities of art film. His works include The Suspended Step, Chronicle of a Durian, The Mountains Sing and The Memo, which have been exhibited at a range of film festivals and contemporary art institutions. In 2023, the film The Memo, directed by the Badlands Film Group, which he co-directed with Chen Sisi, won the Best Documentary Short Award at the 60th Golden Horse Awards, an honor regarded as the highest accolade in the Sinophone cinema industry. In addition, he has contributed to the production of several important art films, serving as a story-boarder, assistant director, or editor, with notable works such as Kaili Blues, The Wild Goose Lake, 14 Paintings, and The Fall.