I found this DVD in a DVD store in China. I thought it had the potential to be real interesting - a realistic portrayal of counterculture in Beijing.Unfortunately, it is a bad film.The youth at the center of the film are simply boring subjects. Most of the film is spent following them around during their daily lives. Nothing interesting happens. Occasionally they make comments the superficiality of society, materialism and what not. Nothing too profound here. Nothing that hasn't been said before.And many of the youth are hypocritical. They think they are special, living against the grain. But the image I got is that they are very much part of the commercial culture. They also have dreams of getting rich and buying big houses.Probably the most annoying thing about this film is that the vast majority of the dialogue is in English - both the filmmakers, Germans, and the Chinese subjects, speaking in broken English.In a film about China, why don't they speak Chinese?

Watching Beijing Bubbles throws up the question, what it is that makes the exploration of an issue interesting - or worth to follow. In the end for Beijing Bubbles clearly applies the answer that most artists would perhaps give: It depends on what you can connect to your own life and being.So what can I see about Punk in China: counter culture in a totalitarian state is something completely different than it is in democracy. Like this it throws an interesting picture on how and why such movements develop in general. It is not by accident that they are linked to big urban areas and not only for the reason that here you simply have many people. Counter culture in a NIC means you perform next to masses of people who live below the poverty rate. Does that give such a movement a less harsh and more social character? And last but not least counter culture in a country which probably never really had anything like that before: Imagine western Pop/Rock culture if there would have been no 70's, no Grunge, no Punk or all of that only in shadows. That is perhaps why there seems to shine through some (from post 70's view perhaps naive) optimism in Beijing's punk rock scene.Don't expect further comments on this in the movie, but if you want to get some impressions like this to think about, then go and watch it.