The Chinese Mayor

Datong was once a capital of China; today it is one of the country's most polluted cities, its infrastructure collapsed and its economy stalled. Mayor Geng Yanbo decides to return the city to what it was sixteen hundred years ago: the Ming-era walls will be rebuilt and the old city put up again. The cost is enormous. Close to two hundred thousand homes are to be demolished and half a million people moved. Zhou Hao's documentary gets into the mayor's meetings and into the arguments on the street; the camera records both the anger of people losing their homes and the mayor's own conviction. The film declares Geng neither a hero nor a monster. It won an award at Sundance in 2015; Geng was transferred to another city in 2014 and the projects were left unfinished.