At her 70th birthday celebration, the aged mother of the Gu family suffers from a stroke, which precipitates her decline into dementia. Who will take care of her? The four brothers face crucial changes in their relationships to one another, as they deal with their own family problems.Read More »
Quote:
A Chinese girl named Xingxi travels alone to Alor Setar, a town in Northern Malaysia. As the result of a blown tire, she experiences three variant adventures. She introduces herself to people as different identities with mysterious secrets. Brooke claims herself a traveler in the first adventure, but an anthropologist in the second adventure. In the third adventure, Brooke is a disheartened woman who comes across French writer Pierre. Two lonely travelers become intimate friends. They share their respective insights into life, death, and love. As the enigmatic story of Alor Setar begins to unfold, Brooke tells Pierre the true reason why she has come. Nature divulges her sought for love with the magical Blue Tears.Read More »
Quote:
Just as in her previous film, Oxhide, the Chinese director films herself and her parents in their rather claustrophobic apartment with documentary realism. She uses nine fixed camera positions, with which she turns clockwise around the kitchen table (so that the last shot has exactly the same perspective as the first). The shots, from 5 to 20 minutes long, were made from close by, so that the three family members largely remain off-screen. The resulting rigorously minimalist story passes in real time: Oxhide II is as long as it takes to clear a worktable, to prepare Chinese dumplings on it and to eat them. While the meal is being prepared, the three talk occasionally about the problems surrounding their bag shop, with the wife and daughter having a serious word with the father. However, as long as they talk about making dumplings, the family is united.Read More »
Quote:,he most important Chinese film of the past several years—and one of the most astonishing recent films from any country—doesn’t come from the so-called Sixth Generation, formerly underground Chinese rebel directors whose output has fed Western film festivals regularly since the early 90s (e.g., Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Zhang Yuan). Nor does it come from the newly anointed masters of the Fifth Generation, whose leaders, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, are busying themselves these days crafting media content, cinema morphed into blockbuster-ready marketing opportunities. The film is called Oxhide (a literal, though pleasantly strange direct translation of the Chinese title Niupi ), and it comes from young female first-time director Liu Jiayin.Read More »
Synopsis:
In a future century, after the apocalypse, Gui Dao dynasty controls continental Asia. Zhuai and his younger brother Mian are captured and sent to “Prosperity Camp” for reeducation. They soon discover that the camp’s aim is to brainwash people with propaganda. Five years later, there’s a change in government and they are free again. Zhuai falls in love for the beautiful Xuelan and together they take her to an old industrial city, now deserted. They get themselves a place to live in an abandoned apartment and try to rediscover the little pleasures of life.Read More »
Synopsis:
Thirteen dinners of a Chinese migrant worker’s family over the course of fourteen months. The film portrays a series of random occurrences. Joys, frustrations and the struggle for survival. The meals unfold in real-time through thirteen static, long takes. Each take captures with vivid detail the reality of the relationships between the different family members. As the seasons unfold, so does time and the echoes for better working conditions penetrate the frame. Issues such as the one-child policy and the possibilities for better wages weigh heavily on the minds of the three-generation family. Read More »
In the far mountains of Ningxia province, the old Ma Zishan and his son start mourning his wife. Loved by everyone in the village and the family, the son wants to sacrifice their only bull for her 40 days disappearance ceremony. Zishan isn’t against it, but his sorrow and his love for the old animal make him wonder. Even his prayers and the Imam don’t seem to erase his doubts. Until one morning the old bull stops eating and drinking. Has he seen the knife in the clear water?Read More »
Nearly two decades after scripting the Infernal Affairs trilogy which has been liberally remade and borrowed from, Felix Chong’s new crime thriller does some pilfering and copying of its own. Spotting Project Gutenberg’s high-profile, largely Hollywood influences isn’t difficult, but derivation is rarely as entertaining as this slick Hong Kong effort about a high-stakes counterfeiting operation — and rarely comes with such compelling and engaging performances from the starry likes of Chow Yun-Fat and Aaron Kwok.Read More »
Synopsis
A Yangtze Landscape utilizes a non-narrative style, setting off from the Yangtze’s marine port Shanghai, filming all the way to the Yangtze River’s source, Qinghai/Tibet – filming a total distance of thousands of kilometers. Experimental music and noise recorded live on scene are used in post-production, painstakingly paired with relatively independent visuals, creating a magically realistic atmosphere contrasted with people seeming to be ‘decorative figures’ right out of traditional Chinese landscape scrolls.Read More »