China

Plot Summary:
The river Suzhou that flows through Shanghai is a reservoir of filth, chaos and poverty, but also a meeting place for memories and secrets. Lou Ye, who spent his youth on the banks of the Suzhou, shows the river as a Chinese Styx, in which forgotten stories and mysteries come together. Mardar, a motorcycle courier in his mid-twenties, rides all over the city with all kinds of packages for his clients. He knows every inch and is successful thanks to the fact that he never asks questions. One day he is asked by a shady alcohol smuggler to deliver his sixteen-year-old daughter, Moudan, to her aunt. Read More »

Quote:
Guo Ke follows his multiple-award winning short Thirty Two with the searching and highly moving documentary Twenty Two, which again focuses on the subject of Chinese ‘comfort women’ during World War II.

At the time of filming, only 22 of the 200,000 Chinese victims forced into sexual slavery during World War II remained alive. Through a restrained and careful approach, Twenty Two offers a look at the current situation and lives of these 22 elderly women. Quietly humanistic, the engaging and challenging film follows the subjects as they go about their daily lives, listening to them talk about their experiences and their own perspectives on life, including both suffering and happiness. Read More »

Synopsis
In the wake of China’s open-door policy in the early 1980’s, Fujian was one of the first Chinese coastal provinces to be opened to the outside world. Many of the male residents opted to go abroad for work, leaving behind their wives and families. Two decades later, Fujian is a microcosm of Chinese modernity: there are palatial suburbs populated by lonely “remittance widows”; neon-lit discotheques frequented by karaoke kids; coastal villages inhabited by impoverished fishermen and city centers dominated by gangs, snakeheads and language schools acting as fronts for organized human trafficking.Read More »

Realistic portraits of Chinese youth embracing western culture.Read More »

Quote:
A key Fifth Generation work released during the second phase of Deng Xiaoping’s social and economic reforms, this robust social satire delightfully depicts the clash between the rising class of rapid industrial modernizers and old Party cadres with a serious Cultural Revolution hangover. The film chronicles the Kafkaesque predicament of a bumbling factory translator who is suspected of industrial espionage after sending an innocent telegram that is intercepted by a militant snoop. (The “black cannon” of the title refers to the missing chess piece the hapless hero is trying to locate.) Placed under investigation and reassigned to a less sensitive department but never informed of the reason for his demotion, he petitions to get his job back, sparking an increasingly obtuse and hilarious series of Party meetings, set in a boardroom straight out of German Expressionism.Read More »

Wu is in her mid-twenties and lives with her mother in a traditional one-story house in one of Beijing’s hutongs. Both consider themselves to be writers, but success has so far eluded them. The fact that Wu is supported by a divorced, elderly man helps the women through lean periods. Their unhealthily close relationship is characterized by reproaches and quibbling; only during meals do they appear to lay down their verbal weapons. The situation escalates when both Wu and her mother hit an emotional low.Read More »

Latiaozi was a Farmer who made a living with shepherding with his wife Jinzhizi. One day, their only son had been condemned for the crime. The couple scrabbled up 50000 Yuan to ask Li Datou, the able person of the town, for help, begging if Li Datou could find some big shot to reduce the penalty of their son. But they had been cheated. Latiaozi went to Li Datou’s home to argue for his money but he failed. On his way home, he met a fool by accident. He had no choice but to pick him home. After a night spent in sheepfold, the fool was sent back to the town…Read More »

Cinema-scope.com:
This film uses perfectly framed long takes, from a largely distant yet intimately engaged camera, to tell the story of a film crew driving around Tibet looking for actors to play in a filmed version of the opera. It wraps this quest around two concurrent love stories, and the whole becomes a masterpiece of understated emotional longing set against an urgent desire to preserve a disappearing culture.Read More »

Summary from Icarus Films:
A family on the Himalayan plains discovers their dog is worth a fortune, but selling it comes at a terrible price.

The Tibetan nomad mastiff is an exotic prize dog in China, fetching as much as millions of dollars from wealthy Chinese. When a young man notices several thefts of mastiffs from Tibetan farm families, he decides to sell his family’s dog before it is stolen and sold on the black market. His father, an aging Tibetan herder, is furious when he discovers their dog missing. When the father seeks to buy the dog back, it leads to a series of tragicomic events that threaten to tear the family apart, while showing the erosion of Tibetan culture under the pressures of contemporary society.Read More »