We’re joined by Mitch Moxley, author of numerous articles on Chinese film in the New York Times and the Atavist, and of Apologies to My Censor, about his six years reporting in China, to talk about Dying to Survive. Then, Hao Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard’s China Health Partnership who’s worked on provider payment reform in Henan, tells us about the healthcare realities the film dramatizes.

Poet Yi Wu talks about the mysteries and excesses of Hello Mr. Billionaire. Actor Michael Gralapp — a Hawaiian businessman who fell into the Chinese film world and became “basically China’s Winston Churchill,” — tells us about playing Warren Luffett in Hello Mr. Billionaire and about his adventures on Propaganda Department sets. Marc Blecher, author of China Against the Tides, talks about the ideology beneath the film’s surface.

We’re joined by Carl Zha, host of the Silk and Steel Podcast, to talk about the cuteness and craziness of the Monster Hunt series, and by Guillaume Aretos, production designer of Monster Hunt 2, and the art director of Shrek and Antz, to talk about his work on the film and his magical perspective on the state of the global animation industry.

What happens when you put together a war correspondent, a UFC fighter, and one of Hong Kong’s leading MMA journalists? The latest episode of Uproar in the Studio. First, the brilliant May Jeong tells us about reporting her amazing profile of Fan Bingbing in this month’s Vanity Fair. Then, Sam Alvey sits in as our UFC expert as we talk through every single goofy aspect of Never Say Die. He tells what it’s like to fight all over the world, and how he’d never been punched before the start of his fighting career. Finally, Matt Eaton talks about the inroads Mixed Martial Arts have made into China in the last couple years, the brutality of triad involvement in the fighting world, and about Lethwei, “the most brutal form of unarmed combat going around these days.”

First we introduce the show. Then we interview Chris Berry, Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London, one of the foremost scholars of the Chinese blockbuster, and a former employee of China Film, the old state monopoly, about the how the Chinese film industry we know today came to be. We close out on a conversation about the Ex-File 3 with Tina Shen, who’s worked in the Chinese television world and whose short film Recipe is coming soon. When we started working on this show, The Ex-File 3 was 10th on the top ten highest grossing Chinese films list, but with the industry like it is, that list changes so fast.