China

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Dawn Breaking is the opening chapter of Yang Fudong’s Museum Film Project. The idea of the series first conceived while Yang worked on his solo exhibition in Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in 2005. After more than a decade, the first episode has been fulfilled this year in Shanghai Long Museum. Yang set the background of “Dawn Breaking” in Song dynasty which was prominent for achievements in art, culture and science. He also extracted nearly three hundred sentences of Nietzsche’s Quotations as the exclusive script. Live performance in the context of ancient oriental history intertwines with the quotes of desire, and power from the German philosopher. Read More »

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Growing up in the shadows of Shanghai, Bei (Li Zhinan), a disillusioned dancer, spends most of his time in a drug-induced haze. But when he begins developing AIDS-like symptoms and fears he could be seriously ill, he turns to his three best friends to help him forget. Complications ensue when Bei and another friend, Jie (Zhou Zijie), begin to feel more than mutual camaraderie, which throws their sexuality into serious question.Read More »

Synopsis
Turtle Rock is a tiny mountain village of seven households with uncontaminated natural beauty. But grandma, her son and grandson, being isolated from the modern world, are experiencing evolving dilemmas and struggles…Read More »

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A wondrous prostitute plies her trade while living on a boat in Hong Kong. With a superhuman libido and three loving husbands, she doggedly devotes herself to her work. Using sex to satirize the era, this film brims with intense desire.Read More »

Synopsis:
An idealistic schoolteacher leaves his wife and family behind in 1930s Shanghai to join the Red Cross in the fight against the Japanese invasion. After he is captured, he escapes to Chongqing, where he marries a high-society hostess and establishes a new bourgeois life for himself. Meanwhile, his family lives a life of poverty in a squatter’s camp in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Director Zheng and veteran filmmaker Cai (who focused mainly on the screenplay for fear of reprimand from the ruling Kuomintang Government) successfully intercut between the parallel narratives, which reflect the contradictory social conditions of prerevolutionary China and bring an epic scale to the life of the Chinese everyman. Considered the country’s equivalent of Gone with the Wind, this sweeping melodrama gave rise to a “romantic family epic” craze in 1940s China.Read More »

Deng is a stubborn retired widow who spends her days caring about her two grown up sons and her elderly mother, despite her family efforts to stop her. But her daily routine starts derailing when she keeps receiving anonymous calls…Read More »

IMDB synopsis:
Based on the myth of Orpheus: in Lhasa, a young woman encounters a lobster that will change her life.

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A journey that takes the myth of Orpheus as a starting point and that accompanies the protagonist on a pilgrimage that is physical, but also psychological. In her journey she meets different characters who represent a dysfunctional society. The memories and hallucinations seem real, and reality seems like a hallucination. As a viewer, the journey however has not led me anywhere.Read More »

Chronicles the fortunes of two actresses in pre-revolutionary China, who are separated by money and politics.Read More »

Being shelved for four years over censorship issues sounds like a death knell for any film, and yet in the case of Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land, it may actually have been a considerable boon : indeed, the four-years delay meant that the film came out after the comedy Lost In Thailand, which starred two of the leads of No Man’s Land (Xu Zheng and Huang Bo), and thus became positioned as their follow-up to what is still the all-time highest-grossing Chinese film in China. It did however lose its potential status as China’s very first modern-day set western – with Gao Qunshu’s Wind Blast having been released in the meantime – though in truth it is closer to a film noir than a western, with moody voice-over and a cynical outlook on human nature. It tells of an arrogant big city lawyer (Xu Zheng) who travels to the far west of China to plead the case of a falcon trafficker (Togbye), then tries to rush back to the city to close a book deal on that very case.Read More »