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Mei is an exotic, beautiful blind dancer, associated with a dangerous revolutionary gang, known as the House of Flying Daggers. Captured by officers of the decadent Tang Dynasty, Mei finds herself both threatened by and attracted to the most unusual circumstances. Here, her heart and loyalties battle each other, amid warriors in the treetops and dazzling combat the likes of which have never before been seen!Read More »
Synopsis:
In a high-rise, a young man jumps to his death. His ghost remains in the building, observing and consoling three households. San San, fat, silent, and alone, hears the ghost of her mother constantly upbraid her. She futilely seeks the friendship of a wealthy woman with whom she was raised. Ah Gu, a tofu soup vendor, is at odds with Lily, his materialistic wife, a Chinese immigrant who longs for something he cannot provide. Meng spouts every moralistic bromide of the striving middle class, wears a T-shirt reading “My block is the cleanest,” and is unhinged by his teenage sister May (“Trixie” to her boyfriend) who won’t study, parties all night, and seems doomed by youth culture.Read More »
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Recent Taiwanese cinema has almost had a monopoly on the kind of angst that permeated so many European art films of the 1960’s. The anomie that envelops Lin Cheng-sheng’s ”Murmur of Youth” in a mist of melancholy has everything to do with the collision of traditional and modern values in a boom economy. The film follows two college-age girls, both named Mei-li, from different backgrounds, who end up working side by side as ticket takers in a movie theater in a teeming shopping arcade.Read More »
Two years after forming his own production company, Jet Tone, Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai released ASHES OF TIME, a martial-arts epic based on THE EAGLE-SHOOTING HEROES, a series of novels by Louis Cha writing under the pseudonym Jin Yong. The film was set in jianghu, an imaginary world with its own views of good and evil. In 2008, unhappy with the many alternate versions of ASHES OF TIME available, Wong reedited and restored the film, working with the original negative and soundtrack, which were in severe disrepair. Read More »
A modest family is destined for tragedy due to the rivalry between two teenage stepsisters. It begins when Tao Lan accidentally kills her stepsister. Seventeen years later, a female guard escorts the solitary Tao Lan, now a stranger to life outside prison, to her first painful family reunion…Read More »
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An unschooled young man, one of the countless victims of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, is labouring in the countryside when he is suddenly assigned to teach in a near-by village school. Gradually, he finds the confidence to ditch the Maoist textbook and encourage the barely literate kids to write about their own lives and feelings. At the same time, through a series of dream-like meetings with a young cowherd, he begins to sense the possibilities of a life beyond the parameters of traditional education.Read More »
Synopsis
In the 1980s, encouraged by the government, a large number of families leave Chinese cities to settle in the poorer regions of the country, in order to develop local industry. The film’s main character is a 19 years old girl who lives in the Guizhou province, where her parents have settled. That’s where she has grown up, where her friends are and where she first experiences love. But her father believes that their future lies in Shanghai. How can they all keep on living together when they don’t share the same dreams?Read More »
Based on the true story of a Chinese painter, Pan Yuliang (Gong Li), whose work was celebrated in Paris yet rejected at home. At fifteen years old, she was sold into prostitution. Her life changes when she marries a high official. Through her husband, she finds expression in western painting, and furthers her studies in Paris. Although highly respected in Paris, it wasn’t until after her death that she received the acceptance at home she so desperately sought. The film is directed by Huang Shuqin, a woman director famous for highlighting the influence of tradition on gender issues.Read More »
Synopsis
Very much a celebration of Chinese solidarity in the face of the return of Hong Kong to their control, this costume drama begins at the turn of the century as a virginal Chinese girl flees via a raging river from being sacrificed in a religious ceremony. When she emerges, she is in Tibet where she becomes part of a local community. At the same time, a Scottish explorer and his British interpreter enter the same area and are saved from execution by a Tibetan horseman who takes them back to his tribe. Read More »