CHICAGO, IL.- Robert Adanto’s feature-length documentary, The Rising Tide, which explores China’s meteoric march toward the future through the words and works of some of the Middle Kingdom’s most talented photographers and video artists, including Wang Qingsong, Cao Fei, Xu Zhen, Yang Yong, Chen Qiulin and O Zhang, will screen in association with Reversed Images: Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago on October 1st.

Shot in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen in the summer of 2006, this unflinching and incisive study captures the confusion and ambiguity that characterize the new China. “An often surprising and thought-provoking documentary,” wrote WICN’s Mark Lynch, “The rest of us better make an effort to grasp what their work is about, or get out of the way. An “eye-opener” in every sense of the word, if you are an artist, curator or art teacher be sure to catch this film.”

The documentary premiered at the United Kingdom's China Now! Festival as part of Constant Stream: China 08 at the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre in London, where it screened with a film by acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke. The film has also enjoyed screenings at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, The Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, The National Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, The Worcester Art Museum, and The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami. The film was also featured at The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, screening in conjunction Shanghai Kaleidoscope, an exhibition curated by Christopher Phillips of the International Center for Photography in NY, and was an Official Selection of The Cape Winelands Film Festival in Cape Town, South Africa. In May of 2009, the film screened in association with Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, MA and at the Hong Kong International Art Fair, where Mr. Adanto participated in Asia Art Archives’ Backroom Conversations series. In June, the film was screened in conjunction with The China Project at The Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia and The Works Art and Design Festival in Edmonton, Alberta. Later in October, the film will screen at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, in conjunction with Art for the Millions: 100 Sculptures from the Mao Era.