A young Japanese film maker is in hospital in Tokyo. His estranged father tries to visit, but the son refuses to see him. So, as a gesture of reconciliation, the father decides to go to China to complete the filming of a Chinese opera, called “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles,” which the son was working on but unable to finish.Read More »
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When I first came across ‘A Confucian Confusion’, I expected nothing much. I was wrong, very wrong. It turned out to be a great movie. On one of your ‘average’ days, go to a video store, then rent and watch it. I guarantee it will be the best thing on your day. (‘Average’ here means the rest of the days when you don’t win lotto or have a date of your life)
The film looks at a sample of modern Taiwanese life. Edward Yang the director, who won some awards for his later film ‘Mahjong’, focuses at a different part of the taiwanese society. If in ‘Mahjong’ he tells the story through the darker gangsters-like fraction of the population, here he puts a light above a ‘whiter’ group of people, mid to upper class men and women trying to cope with the fast living in the money-driven, ever growing Taipei. And that’s all the film’s about, a window to some Taipei lives in particular and modern taiwan in general. A society as a result, not necessarily an effect, of the very old Confucian philosophy.Read More »
Synopsis
In 1982 a small group of Taiwanese filmmakers reinvented Asian cinema, among them, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Edward Yang. Travelling from Europe to Latin America to Asia, Flowers of Taipei sets out to assess the global influence of Taiwan New Cinema.Read More »
Filmed over three years on China’s railways, THE IRON MINISTRY traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, and language and gesture. Scores of rail journeys come together into one, capturing the thrills and anxieties of social and technological transformation. THE IRON MINISTRY immerses audiences in fleeting relationships and uneasy encounters between humans and machines on what will soon be the world’s largest railway network.Read More »
Nick Schager (Lessons of Darkness) wrote:
Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first film set entirely in present-day Taiwan, Goodbye South, Goodbye concerns two low-level gangster brothers – easygoing Gao (Jack Kao) and impulsive Flathead (Giong Lim) – who, along with their girlfriends Pretzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh) and Ying (Kuei-Yin Hsu), navigate the rural outskirts of Taipei trying to earn enough money to open a restaurant. However, since the director is more interested in atmosphere and conveying a sense of time’s relentless progression than he is with straightforward narrative clarity, Goodbye South, Goodbye is more elliptical mood piece than traditional gangster flick. Gao and Flathead organize illegal card games, attempt to sell pigs at inflated prices, and engage in a variety of other misbegotten business ventures, all the while drinking, smoking, and coasting through life with the vague, imperceptive grogginess of men incapable of seeing the forest from the trees.Read More »
Three lonely young denizens of Taipei unknowingly share an apartment used for sexual trysts.Read More »
Roger Ebert wrote:
To Live is a simple title, but it conceals a universe. The film follows the life of one
family in China, from the heady days of gambling dens in the 1940s to the austere
hardship of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. And through all of their fierce struggles
with fate, all of the political twists and turns they endure, their hope is basically one
summed up by the heroine, a wife who loses wealth and position and children, and
who says, “All I ask is a quiet life together.” The movie has been directed by Zhang
Yimou, the leading Chinese filmmaker right now (although this film offended Beijing and
earned him a two-year ban from filmmaking). It stars his wife, Gong Li, the leading
Chinese actress (likewise banned). Together their credits include Ju Dou, Raise the Red
Lantern and The Story of Qui Ju. Like them it follows the fate of a strong woman, but
also this time a strong man; somehow they stick together through incredible hardships.Read More »
From DVD distributor trigon-film:
Wu Hongyan, woman executioner in her thirties, works at the court in the province of Shaanxi in China, where she executes women condemned to death only. In spite of her macabre job, Wu Hongyan travels every weekend to a town nearby to join parties organized by a marriage bureau. The result of her dating is mediocre, until she meets the mysterious Li Jun. But she is thousands of miles away of imagining that Li Jun’s wife is the last of the women she executed. Electrifying!Read More »
Synopsis / Plot
In the 19th century in China, two girls named Snow Flower and Lily are bonded together for eternity. They are paired as laotong (in English: old sames) by a matchmaker who is also responsible for arranging their marriages. They are isolated by their families and communicate by writing in a secret language, Nu shu (a historical practice in China in that period).
Meanwhile, in the present day Shanghai, their descendants Sophia and Nina struggle with the intimacy of their own childhood friendship. As teenagers, Sophia and Nina were introduced to the idea of laotong, and they signed a traditional laotong contract. Then, they must understand the story of the ancestral connection, hidden from them in the folds of the antique white silk fan, or lose one another.Read More »