Mandarin

Yun Fei, a young poet, seeks the advice of an old university friend who lives in the Beijing suburbs, discovering that his friend has gone into business breeding black chickens. Discouraged about his future as a poet, Yun Fei starts a relationship with a colorblind young girl who encourages him to persevere. But even this new relationship is not enough to inspire him to write. It’s at this point that he buys a pirated record whose magical powers bring him the success he’s longed for. However, sudden fame does not seem to solve everything. The first film of Beijing theatre director Meng Jing Hui, Chicken Poets is an insightful and poetic look at materialism and the younger generation in China.Read More »

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Youth (Hard Times) is the second chapter of Wang Bing’s monumental opus on the diminished youth of China, who work seemingly endless hours and have traded life for financial exploitation. Making low wages, they view earning money as their sole horizon.Read More »

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This documentary installation consists of a single, 15-hour take shot in a garment factory in China and captures the daily labor of its 300,000 migrant workers and the functioning of its 18,000 production units. Rigorous and hypnotic, 15 Hours marks Wang’s most radical meditation on the contemporary meaning of work and the state of labor conditions in present-day China.Read More »

Set in Shanghai during the 1930s, the story is inspired by John Woo’s classic work Bullet in the Head, released in 1990.Read More »

Qiang is a four-year-old little rebel… a clever child with sparkly eyes and an indomitable will. As his parents frequently work away from Beijing, they decide to take Qiang to board at a well-appointed residential nursery school.

Life at the kindergarten appears rich and colourful, made up of a variety of cheerfully sunny rituals and games meant to train these children to be good members of society. But it’s not so easy for Qiang to adapt to this kind of carefully organised, minutely scrutinised collective life.A fierce individualist in miniature, he tries but fails to conform to the model his teachers enforce. Yet he still craves the reward that the other students win: the little red flowers awarded each day as tokens for good behaviour.Read More »

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Shi Ba is an alienated youngster living by himself in Beijing. He quits his “iron-rice-bowl” job arranged by his late high-ranking parents and becomes a private entrepreneur. While he is wandering in a Beijing subway station one day, he meets Yu Jing, a pretty dance student. Their relationship soon leads to cohabitation. Shi Ba’s involvement with some illegal business brings him wealth and threats of blackmail as well. The blackmailers leave him with a crippled leg after he refuses to comply with their demands. Although this docs not prevent him from marrying Yu Jing, Shi Ba never manages to maintain his human dignity in and outside the family. One evening, after some self-meditation, he jumps over the railing of a balcony and throws himself into the darkness.Read More »

The film follows three characters on a tour of the remote Yunman province of China where they travel with a horse to deal with legal disputes in mountain villages…Read More »

An unsuspecting swordsman is used by a power-hungry chief minister to betray China’s emperor.Read More »

A seaside village, Guangdong province, China, the present day. Actor-writer Fang Yi’nan (Shawn Yue) and actress Lin Huibao (Shu Qi) have been together since they met after graduating at drama college, though Huibao’s elder identical twin sister Huixiang (Shu Qi) is also in love with him. Huibao has the secondary female role in a costume musical drama that Yi’nan has written, starring himself and older actress Amy (Chen Shu), called The Legend of Plum Blossom .Read More »