Yuan Zhang

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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The most daring and achieved of all the ‘illegal’ independent films made in China in the ’90s – and quite probably the last, since it prompted the Film Bureau to formally outlaw unauthorised production and confiscate the directors Zhang Yuan’s passport.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 »