Fifth Generation Chinese Cinema

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A man is murdered on a bus for trying to stop a pickpocket; no one lifts a finger to help him. He returns as a ghost and questions the empathy of the onlookers.

There are three spaces in this film. One of them is reality–like the incident on the bus. Another is the space of history, stretching back centuries to the matriarchal society of Banpo Village, outside Xi’an. You see the Mother, playing the drum. And there’s also the space of the imaginary–what the characters are thinking. In fact, it’s the space of the human soul.Read More »

Plot: The young teacher Li Mingguang is to be murdered in the north of China because of having taken the virginity from the young girl Li Pingwa. The whole family wants to take revenge on him for that, even the whole village.Read More »

Quote:
The rise and fall of a family in Shanghai. Once wealthy and capitalist, the family unraveled during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Their home, once a French concession mansion, was converted into a multi-family dwelling. Years later, the matriarch of the family announces that she is dying. When her four grown children return, it becomes the first time the family has been under one roof in decades.Read More »

Gu Changwei’s Longtou—shot documentary style—features a series of characters who dwell on the realities of expectation, punctuated by a series of memorable shots (a cat stalking and jumping onto an air conditioner unit; an elderly man dragging a series plastic bottles; a weight-lifter practicing his moves and a child blowing bubbles) and nice use of music.Read More »

In this metaphysical adventure two very different men come to the same mountain to hunt a special fox and end up hunting each other.Read More »

Plot: Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.Read More »

Five Eighth-Route army soldiers induce a isolated Japanese squad to capitulate.

Set on the end of WWII, Evening Bell follows a battle-hardened band of five Chinese soldiers struggling across a remote landscape wracked by post-armistice horrors. Stumbling from one grim aftermath to the next, they bury piles of the dead, help terrified peasants disarm landmines and save a Japanese officer from dying of exposure. When the officer leads them to a detachment of thirty-three starving Japanese soldiers, the film becomes a tension-filled standoff. In his films Wu Ziniu attempts to lead audiences below the surface of war to focus on human relationships instead of ideology. Needless to day, his approach to this genre has brought him criticism within China. (His third feature Dove Tree, about the Chinese-Vietnamese Border war, is still banned for its sympathetic treatment of the enemy.) Read More »

Synopsis
Wang runs a little noodle shop in a small desert town near Jiayu Pass not far from the Great Wall. He lives in his shop with his wife and their staff. But life with Wang is far from pleasant: he’s a real skinflint who only thinks about himself, and he sometimes doesn’t pay his staff for months on end. His wife also suffers at the hands of this domestic tyrant, although a discrete affair with Li, the shy cook, helps her to bear her lot in life. Every time she needs some more rouge, Li drives his boss lady into town where they have sex. But their regular little tryst doesn’t go unnoticed. Shortly beforehand, Li’s lover purchases a gun from a Persian carpet salesman and gives it to the cook for safekeeping. Wang, she says, must die – it’s the only way they can be happy. In the meantime, a waiter named Zhao and a policeman named Zhang inform Wang about his wife’s love affair and the gun that Li keeps hidden.Read More »

Lu Yun, an anchor of a television program, becomes pregnant before marriage but decides to have an induced abortion. After this induced abortion experience, she realizes the social problem of pregnancy before marriage and makes up her mind to carry out a special topic report in the hospital. In this movie, Chinese female’s attitude towards sex and the state of the sex education, sexual harassment in the office, incest happening between fathers and daughters, ultra-marriage love affairs, especially the harm done to the female who is pregnant before marriage are directly revealed.Read More »