Lu and Feng are a devoted couple forced to separate when Lu is arrested and sent to a labor camp as a political prisoner during the Cultural Revolution. He finally returns home only to find that his beloved wife no longer recognizes him.

Extras:
Feature-length audio commentary with Yimou Zhang
Toronto Film Festival Q&A with Yimou Zhang (18:48)
Theatrical Trailer (2:22)

2.89GB | 1 h 48 min | 1024×428 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/99B749014758118/Coming_Home.mkv https://nitro.download/view/8331755009D4791/Coming_Home_Extras.rar

Language(s):Mandarin+commentary
Subtitles:English, French, Portuguese, Spanish

The post Yimou Zhang – Gui lai AKA Coming Home [+Extras] (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Based on the true story of a Chinese painter, Pan Yuliang (Gong Li), whose work was celebrated in Paris yet rejected at home. At fifteen years old, she was sold into prostitution. Her life changes when she marries a high official. Through her husband, she finds expression in western painting, and furthers her studies in Paris. Although highly respected in Paris, it wasn’t until after her death that she received the acceptance at home she so desperately sought. The film is directed by Huang Shuqin, a woman director famous for highlighting the influence of tradition on gender issues.

1.37GB | 2h 05mn | 512 x 384 | avi

https://nitroflare.com/view/88997F443C7ADF7/Hua.Hun.cd1.avi
https://nitroflare.com/view/F25A91F2D0F22F8/Hua.Hun.cd2.avi

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:English hard subbed

The post Shuqin Huang – Hua Hun aka A Soul Haunted by Painting (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:

Celebrated Mainland filmmaker Zhang Yimou brings his inimitable touch to Red Sorghum, a sumptuous drama set during 1930s China, just prior to the Japanese occupation. Jiu’er (Gong Li) is a young bride arranged to marry the leprous owner of a sorghum winery. But the leper dies, and Jiu’er takes over the winery, along with her lover (Jiang Wen), a burly rogue with a natural, rough charisma. Their rural lives are filled with struggle and even joy, but the invasion of the Japanese brings tragedy and blood to their doorsteps. Told in glorious shades of red, Red Sorghum is quintessential Zhang Yimou, and uses setting, cinematography, and stunning imagery to create characters and mood that are both iconic and recognizable. Gong Li and Jiang Wen both turn in revelatory performances. As both an anti-war film and a portrait of pre-Communist Chinese life, Red Sorghum is a compelling, powerful achievement from a true master of cinema.

Red Sorghum was the first directorial effort of controversial Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou. The director’s favorite leading lady Gong Li plays a young woman of the 1920s whose family sells her into marriage with a wealthy winemaker. At first a loveless union, the relationship blossoms into one of strong friendship and mutual respect. During World War II, Gong Li fights side by side with her husband against the invading Japanese. A sweeping yet intensely personal historical epic, Red Sorghum won the 1988 Golden Bear award at the Berlin Film Festival. Despite its patriotic overtones, the film was heavily censored (when not banned altogether) in certain provinces of Communist China. The first Chinese film to receive a commercial release in the U.S., and the winner of the prestigious Golden Bear at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival, Zhang Yimou’s fable of Chinese life during the ’20s and ’30s, with it’s plenary abundance of astonishingly sensual images, immediately established him as one of the world’s most gifted directors. Yimou’s saga covers his grandmother’s life, from her arranged marriage as a young girl, to the bloody invasion of the Japanese and WWII.

1.52GB | 1 h 31 min | 1024×436 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/D2297A2D44E89E2/Yimou_Zhang_-_(1988)_Red_Sorghum.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin, Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Yimou Zhang – Hong gao liang AKA Red Sorghum [91min edit] (1988) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis
A young woman becomes the fourth wife of a wealthy lord, and must learn to live with the strict rules and tensions within the household.

Raise.the.Red.Lantern.1991.576p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	2h 4mn
Size:	2.35 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	1024x552
Aspect ratio:	1.85:1
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	2 192 Kbps
Audio
Chinese 2.0ch AC-3 @ 448 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/CD327033AA62099/Raise.the.Red.Lantern.1991.576p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language:Mandarin
Subtitles:English, Spanish, French, Greek, Portuguese, Swedish, Vietnamese

The post Yimou Zhang – Da hong deng long gao gao gua aka Raise the Red Lantern (1991) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A woman married to the brutal and infertile owner of a dye mill in rural China conceives a boy with her husband’s nephew but is forced to raise her son as her husband’s heir without revealing his parentage in this circular tragedy.

2.66GB | 1h 35m | 770×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/AEC9D9BA3C98807/Ju.Dou.1990.576p.BluRay.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:English

The post Fengliang Yang & Yimou Zhang – Ju Dou (1990) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The story is adapted from the novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi (simplified Chinese: 陆犯焉识; traditional Chinese: 陸犯焉識) written by Yan Geling. Lu Yanshi had been a professor before being sent to the labour camp (laogai, literally “reform through labor”) during the Cultural Revolution. He escapes from the labour camp in faraway northwest Xining to make his way back to his long-missed wife Feng Wanyu and daughter Dandan. Dandan is a teenage ballerina, and is prevented from playing the lead role due to her father’s outlaw status. So when she stumbles across her father trying to hide in their apartment building to meet her mother, she reveals his presence to the police, and the police are therefore waiting to arrest him when he tries to meet his wife. Lu is captured, his wife is injured in the scuffle, and Dandan is awarded a supporting role in the ballet. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Lu comes home to find his family broken: his wife suffers from amnesia resulting from her injury, and she blames Dandan for having reported her father, and meanwhile Dandan has given up ballet and works in a textile factory.Suffering from shock, following a former official’s sexual harassment, Feng believes that Lu is “Officer Fang” instead of her husband. To reawaken his wife’s memory, Lu pretends to be a total stranger just to be near his wife. Although she becomes friendly with him in his guise as a letter reader or a piano tuner, he cannot get closer to his wife, who is still expecting her husband to return. During his years of imprisonment Lu had written his wife many letters, and he now he writes her some new letters, as if written years earlier, to convince his wife to forgive their daughter for having turned him in. Feng follows this advice and mother and daughter repair their relationship. But the film ends bleakly with Feng still waiting to receive her husband outside the railway station, and Lu standing with her on a snowy day, pretending to be a pedicab driver, still playing any role to be close to her.

http://nitroflare.com/view/FFBDA83F096DC39/Yimou_Zhang_-_%282014%29_Coming_Home.mkv

Language(s):Mandarin
Subtitles:Sorry, no english subtitles yet

The post Yimou Zhang – Gui lai AKA Coming Home (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Roger Ebert wrote:
To Live is a simple title, but it conceals a universe. The film follows the life of one
family in China, from the heady days of gambling dens in the 1940s to the austere
hardship of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. And through all of their fierce struggles
with fate, all of the political twists and turns they endure, their hope is basically one
summed up by the heroine, a wife who loses wealth and position and children, and
who says, “All I ask is a quiet life together.” The movie has been directed by Zhang
Yimou, the leading Chinese filmmaker right now (although this film offended Beijing and
earned him a two-year ban from filmmaking). It stars his wife, Gong Li, the leading
Chinese actress (likewise banned). Together their credits include Ju Dou, Raise the Red
Lantern and The Story of Qui Ju. Like them it follows the fate of a strong woman, but
also this time a strong man; somehow they stick together through incredible hardships.

At first, the troubles are the husband’s own fault. Fugui (Ge You) is a degenerate
gambler who loses his family home and fortune at dice. “Turtle spawn!” his old father cries,
beating him with a stick. His wife Jiazhen (Gong Li) wants nothing more to do with
him, and from a life of indolence he finds himself selling needles and thread on the street.

The man who won his house gives him a set of beautiful shadow puppets, and he goes on
the road as an entertainer, quickly swept up by the Nationalist army to amuse the troops.
Then one morning, drunk, he oversleeps as the army retreats, and he hears a thundering
sound on the snow, which is the Red army advancing. Ever adaptable, he joins them, and
eventually finds his way back to his hometown and his wife, son and daughter.

Life is very hard. But they survive under the new communist regime. (Ironically, the man
who won his house at dice is executed as a counter-revolutionary landowner.) A childhood
illness causes their daughter to become mute and hard of hearing, but in the precise
arithmetic of matchmaking a likely partner is found for her: A supervisor of the Red
Guards at a factory, who is lame.

The story progresses in terms of temporary advances and crushing setbacks, one caused
when a starving doctor, jailed by the Red Guards, cannot assist at a crucial time because he
has gorged himself on seven sweet buns. Another family loss is caused by an old friend,
who vows he owes them a life, and will eventually be called upon for repayment. Years come
and go; jolly murals of Mao Tse Tung appear on the courtyard walls, and then fade in the
sun and rain. And somehow they live.

The best art, it is said, comes from turmoil – from hard times. In China no serious
filmmaking took place for decades, and now great films are coming in a torrent from that
country. The authorities are not always so happy to have the nation’s past examined with
such frankness, and with films like To Live and Blue Kite (released earlier this year)
there is a certain inexorable pattern: They are made, shown at foreign film festivals,
honored (To Live won acting awards at Cannes), play briefly in a few sophisticated
cinemas in Beijing or Shanghai, and then they disappear.

The honesty of To Live earned Zhang Yimou and Gong Li not only a two-year ban on
further co-productions, but a ban on even speaking about their film. But To Live has been
made, it is playing all over the world, it exists on the screen as a fascinating testament about
ordinary human lives conducted under terrifying conditions, when one’s fate could hinge
on a chance remark or an instant political edict from a zealous teenager.

It is a big, strong, energetic film, made by a filmmaker whose vision takes in four
decades of his nation’s history, and who stands apart from all the political currents, and
sees that ordinary people everywhere basically want what his heroine cries out for, a
quiet life. It is exciting to see these new films as they emerge from China. They are
history being written, celebrated, and mourned.

2.96GB | 2h 12m | 1008×544 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4E802CD67FD9949/To.Live.1994.BDRip.x264-KG.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/B0AD7AF785DE33B/To.Live.1994.BDRip.x264.en.srt

Language:Mandarin
Subtitles:English

The post Yimou Zhang – Huozhe AKA To Live (1994) first appeared on Cinema of the World.