Mandarin

After laying bare backward village mentalities in Bloody Morning, Li Shaohong turns her attention to China’s urban middle class. Cao is a photographer, married to an opera singer and with an infant son, caught in the usual professional morass of political compromise. His life starts to fall apart when he learns that his ex-wife also bore him a son some months after their divorce – and when the boy turns up looking for his father. Nothing wildly dramatic, just believable people in believable situations. If the ending seems a touch forced, this is nevertheless a sign that ‘Fifth Generation’ cinema is changing and coming to terms with up-to-date realities.Read More »

Synopsis:
Two friends who haven’t seen each other for thirteen years reunite. One is a successful concert pianist just back from a European tour and the other has just started a new business.Read More »

A father, a retiring mailman, walks his son over his job in the mountainous regions of Hunan province.Read More »

In 1920s China, a bandit arrives in a remote provincial town posing as its new mayor, where he faces off against a tyrannical local nobleman.Read More »

A highway is waiting to go through a quiet village in Hunan, a province in central China where Mao was from. Due to the high cost of construction, construction companies and migrant workers who live on road work rush to here like the tide. In the following four years, they root in this strange place for interests, paying sweat and blood, even their lives. With their arrival, local village and peasants are forced to change their lives. Many hidden interest lines and hidden rules about road construction of the nation are unveiled, together with the shocking truth and emerging secrets.Read More »

A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.Read More »

Tony Rayns wrote:
Should I stay or should I go? The dilemma in the minds of many young Mainland Chinese these days haunts Ma Lixin, who breeds and sells goldfish (and envies their “freedom”) while he makes up his mind what he wants from life. The emigration question has cost him his relationship with Zhuzhu, the from the left in the corps de ballet. New girlfriend Haiying gets him as far as Beijing Airport before he chickens out of flying to San Francisco. Trouble is, they’ve already said their goodbyes to family and friends — and so they find themselves hiding in a rented farmhouse outside the city, pretending to be abroad. It’s a situation which puts their exuberant sex life under considerable strain.Read More »

Filmmaker Jia Zhangke chronicles his local literature festival in Shanxi, China which includes a multi-generational roster of the country’s most esteemed writers.Read More »

A woman inherits her father’s fireworks factory, as he had no son. The business does well and everything works in an orderly fashion until one day, an itinerant painter is hired to decorate the doors and vases at the factory. The woman, forbidden to marry and thereby involve outsiders in the factory ownership, finds herself drawn to the headstrong painter. When they fall in love, the situation throws her entire life into disarray.Read More »