Xu Tong (b. Beijing, 1965) majored in news photography at the Communications University of China before turning to documentary film-making. Now one of the best-known Chinese documentary film-makers outside China, Xu Tong describes himself as a 'nomad' or 'vagabond' film-maker, and *Fortune Teller*, together with *Wheat Harvest* (2009) and *Shattered* (2011), make up his so-called 'Vagabonds Trilogy' of documentaries about unconventional people who live on the margins of society and often outside the law in northern China today. *Wheat Harvest* is an intimate portrait of a group of part-time and seasonal sex workers living and working in a rustic brothel on the rural fringe of Beijing, while *Shattered* examines the difficult relationship between a reclusive elderly former railroad worker and his adult daughter, a former prostitute with business interests in prostitution and illegal mining, in rural Hebei province. *Fortune Teller* is set in a rather similar small town/urban fringe milieu and in common with much modern Chinese independent documentary film-making focusses on the lives of poor, marginalised or dispossessed people who have been rejected or ignored by contemporary society, in this instance for their physical and mental disabilities. Xu Tong's work belongs very much to the Chinese version of the hand-held camera, direct observational school of documentary film-making, and several of his films, notably *Wheat Harvest*, have been severely criticised for grossly intruding on their subjects' privacy and for neglecting to observe the conventions usually employed to disguise their true identities. In much of his work, Xu Tong appears to sympathise or even empathise with the marginality and defiant nonconformity of many of his subjects, and his most recent work, *Cut Out the Eyes*, an epic ethnographic documentary about a highly unconventional, semi-delinquent blind nomadic musician in Inner Mongolia, follows very much in the same line. Interview with Xu Tong:http://www.timeoutbeijing.com/features/Books__Film-Interviews__Features/143462/Interview-controversial-filmmaker-Xu-Tong.html