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Lin Shu-Yu’s semi auto-biographical debut takes us back to 1996, during the time of the tragic Taiwan baseball scandal, an event that devastated many teenage boys. The story follows Yen and Tang and their gang through the last year of their high school life. From chasing girls to midnight skinny dipping to rooting for their favorite baseball team, they do everything together. When an accident throws Yen into a coma, their world starts falling apart.Read More »
Shot in Cambodia and borrowing a title and a punk sensibility from Qiu Miaojin’s classic queer novel, Daphne Xu’s Notes of a Crocodile follows an unnamed woman who roams the streets of a Phnom Penh in flux, encountering humans and animals in her search for a lost friend.Read More »
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This is the first musical film in China which tells the story of Liu San Jie (Liu the Third Sister), a legendary folk female singer of Zhuang minority in Guangxi Autonomous Region.Read More »
A prosecutor on his last case deals with a colleague to exonerate a suspect, making the law just.Read More »
letterboxd review:
shouldn’t surprise anyone that when it comes to china, an obscure film that doesn’t even have a single rating on imdb could reveal itself as one of the most important pieces of their film history lol
the abudant shots of legs and feet to establish location and status are very hong kong, but that specific fluidity the cameras has traversing intimate space is uniquely china again. even on a watermarked, low quality chinese (i think bootleg) streaming salvage of a copy you can’t mistake the liveliness of this era. Read More »
Tony Rayns, Time Out Film Guide wrote:
Zhang Zeming’s beautiful debut feature opens in the early 1960s, just before the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, and focuses on a Cantonese composer unable to get his music published or performed. His troubles with the authorities are lifelong; he entered ‘New China’ with an opium habit, a black mark that cost him his job, broke up his marriage, and pushed him into the shadows, where the only people who will play his stuff are a street orchestra of blind musicians. All his hopes are invested in his son, a promising musician, who runs off as a ‘Red Guard’ and returns ten years later a street-smart delinquent. Tracing an elaborate pattern of betrayals and disappointments, the films avoids all taint of miserabilism. The spirit running through it is that of the music itself: haunting and elegiac, but also strong and proudly rooted in traditional Cantonese culture.Read More »
The life of the epoch-making master of martial arts cinema, King Hu.
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King Hu is the epoch-making master of martial arts cinema. The cinematic aesthetics he created has deeply influenced renowned directors such as Tsui Hark and Ang Lee, and the film industry worldwide. Traveling to Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and the U.S., this film deeply analyzes the extraordinary artistry of King Hu’s cinemas through interviews with over 40 heavyweight figures. Also, this is the first time to reveal his madly pursuit of perfection, and the arduous and wandering journey of life. Through Shih Chun’s footsteps, like traveling through time, the film returns to the film sets where the scenes were being shot back then. The swordsmen turned old but never gave up searching for the great director’s influences, flashing back to fifty years of memories, the sincerity through the relationships are deeply felt.Read More »
A pigeon returns after seven years, reopening familie’s wounds and festering resentments in a town in the illegal pigeon racing circuit.Read More »
