Mandarin

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 »

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Chuen-Sheng is a young man fresh out of military service with dreams of making it as a musician. His sister Ah Fen, unhappily married, nurses a secret incestuous passion for him. While Chuen-Sheng steals money from his father and squanders it on roach-infested hotel rooms and cheap hookers, Ah Fen decides she can’t face her life any more and runs away.Read More »

Ding Hui is a member of Purple Butterfly, a powerful resistance group in Japanese occupied Shanghai. An unexpected encounter reunites her with Itami, an ex-lover… and officer with a secret police unit tasked with dismantling Purple Butterfly.Read More »

An old teahouse in Beijing serves as the stage for a drama that unfolds over several tumultuous decades of modern Chinese history, from the waning days of the Qing dynasty to the eve of the People’s Republic.Read More »

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Ding Bo (Chen Po Lin) and his friends Nan Feng (Fan Bingbing) and Fei Zao aka Fatso (Fei Long) are a trio of 20-something outsiders who have no intention of sitting exams and getting into universities.Read More »

There is usually only one full moon every month, but occasionally there are two – and that second full moon is called the “Blue Moon”. It is said that when a person sees a blue moon and makes a wish, he will be granted a second chance in things. This film is about two young men and a woman who are granted not only a second, but 120 chances. This is because the film is structured in such a way that its five reels of footage can be projected in random sequences every time it is screened and the story will still make sense – the number of possible combinations adds up to 120 times; each time there is a different story, different rhythm and different atmosphere.Read More »

Shijie (2004)

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 Jia Zhang Ke’s The World continues along the same path as Platform and Unknown Pleasures, but it’s livelier. This gorgeous, profoundly melancholy distillation of contemporary China’s precarious global position is his most accessible film to date. From the stunning opening tracking shot, in which Tao (Zhao Tao) glides through the backstage of the eponymous amusement park, loudly asking for a Band-Aid, Jia cannily conflates the magical and the prosaic. The World may end with a whimper, but it certainly starts with a bang. That opening immediately establishes a strong sense of community, but by the end of the film, we learn that among the working class in contemporary Beijing, the bonds of friendship and romance are ephemeral by necessity. Read More »

Synopsis Tian xia di yi (1983):
It’s the 10th century BC, the emperor is not well, and the medicines he is receiving from con artist “Immortal Li” are in reality only making him worse.Read More »