Born to Defend
Jet, a young soldier at the end of the second world war must overcome some abusive Americans who are bullying him as well as the Chinese people.
China
A Great Wall
When computer programmer, Leo Fang, is passed up for promotion, he feels it is because he is Chinese, and quits. He takes his Chinese-American family to Mainland China to visit his relatives, the Chao’s for a vacation. The clash of cultures, between the men, wives, and teenagers, leads to some confusion, and misunderstanding.
In the Wild Mountains
Set in the Shaanxi province of Northern China, In The Wild Mountains is a simple yet insightful tale of village life and how economic changes in the country affect even the most remote regions.
Mama
Often cited as China’s first independent feature film, this low-budget drama, filmed largely in the director’s Beijing apartment, depicts the life of a single mother (a topic considered taboo at the time) caring for her mentally challenged son. Shot with a documentary aesthetic that includes interviews with families of mentally challenged persons, the film helped kick-start the Sixth Generation of filmmakers (including Wang Xiaoshuai and Jia Zhangke) and their ethos of employing documentary realism to … Read more
Good Morning Beijing
DIrected by Zhang Nuanxin. A Beijing bus driver is in love with a ticket-taker, but she becomes pregnant by a Singapore student. 改革开发初期，在北京一个寒冷的清晨。天还没亮，99路气车售票员艾红（马晓晴 饰），与每天骑自行车接她一起上班的王朗（金铁峰 饰）来到车场。李队长（李连义 饰）给他们介绍新来的司机邹永强（王全安 饰）。王朗售票时积极热情，艾红却相反。她跟刚来不久的邹永强走的越来越近 。当王朗又在老地方等艾红上班时，她没有出现。王朗到了车场发现她和邹永强有说有笑的，对他却很冷淡，王朗心里很不好受。永强的哥们是倒爷，出手大方阔绰。羡慕物质生活的艾红，她决心要辞职去挣大钱。艾红遇到了自称是新加坡留学生的陈明克（贾宏声 饰），他请她听歌，又送录音机、新衣服，还邀她去游玩，贪慕虚荣的艾红立马沦陷。不久她向永强提出了分手，永强因失恋的打击开车分神出了事故。艾红发现怀了孕，去找陈明克时却意外得知他是假留学生……
Raise the Red Lantern
China in the 1920’s. After her father’s death, 19 year old Songlian is forced to marry the much older lord of a powerful family. With three wives already, each living in a separate house within the great castle, there is fierce competition for his attention and the privileges that are gained. This competition gets out of hand…
Decisive Engagement: Beiping Tianjin Campaign
Winner of the Golden Rooster for Best Film in 1992. Set in late 1940s, CCP army surrounds and liberates two most important cities in north China, Beiping (now Beijing, the capital of China) and Tianjin.
Ju Dou
A woman married to the brutal and infertile owner of a dye mill in rural China conceives a boy with her husband’s nephew but is forced to raise her son as her husband’s heir without revealing his parentage in this circular tragedy. Filmed in glowing technicolour, this tale of romantic and familial love in the face of unbreakable tradition is more universal than its setting.
Black Snow
Winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1990, Xie Fei’s film is a politically daring tale of urban alienation and despair. A former prisoner, played by the great Chinese actor Jiang Wen, arrives back in his native Beijing to find that he has no family or prospects or friends, just his underworld contacts trying to drag him back into a life of crime… Taking the classic crime thriller ‘hook’ – ex-con struggling to go … Read more
Bethune: The Making of a Hero
True story of Norman Bethune, a medical doctor who fought for justice in China during Mao’s rise to power.
Two Great Sheep
The film follows a peasant couple, Zhao Deshan and his wife Xiuzhi, living in rural Yunnan province near Zhaotong in southern China. Their lives are thrown into upheaval when the local mayor “rewards” them with two foreign sheep donated by a former villager, now an official in Beijing. The couple is then tasked with breeding the sheep for their wool and to bring prosperity to their small community. Much to their chagrin, the sheep do … Read more
Jing Gai’er
Tang Daxing, paroled after seven years in jail for brawling over his high school sweetheart Xiaohui, hopes to find legitimate work so they can finally marry — but the reappearance of an old classmate who has struck it rich poses a temptation: can they withstand the lure of easy money in a fast-changing China? – Written by Ada Shen
Endless Way – Gui Qu Lai
Ah Shui returns with her sister to a remote mountain village in Hunan (Western China) by car(an S.U.V.) and remembers episodes of her life that are related to a water project. Despite being a foggy and sometimes rainy area water is scarce and poverty is omnipresent.
South of the Clouds
Xu Daqin, a retired Chinese factory worker, returns to the remote Yunnan province, where he hopes to reconcile himself with the life and opportunity he passed up in this place 40 years ago.
The Story of Ermei
A portrait of contemporary China seen through the dreams and choices of a young peasant who has accepted her fate.
Baober in Love
Liu Zhi, a young man, depressed and trapped in a loveless marriage with a dominating girl, meets Baober (an ageless young girl) on a Beijing street one day. They fall in love and start to live a strange, mysterious life….
Night and Day
Set against the background of unregulated coalmining in northern China, the protagonist Guansheng must deal with an unquiet conscience when his mentor, Zhongmin, dies in a mine explosion. Zhongmin’s ghost returns with a request which motivates Guansheng out of his lethargy but which will try him to the depths of his soul. (Adelaide Film Festival)
Waiting Alone
Set in modern day Bejing, Waiting Alone is a coming-of-age story of Wen (Xia Yu), an antique shop owner and aspiring author who has just met the girl of his dreams. Waiting Alone shows us a China rarely seen in cinema, a China that is contemporary, hip and vibrant.
Electric Shadows
For no apparent reason, a mute young woman assaults a youth who delivers water on his bicycle, injuring him and ruining his bike. Surprisingly, she asks him to feed her fish while she is in custody. Her tiny apartment, he discovers, is a shrine to his favorite escape, the movies.
Kung Fu Hustle
In Shanghai, China in the 1940s, a wannabe gangster aspires to join the notorious “Axe Gang” while residents of a housing complex exhibit extraordinary powers in defending their turf.
A World Without Thieves
Two grifters, Wang Bo and Wang Li, a couple who’ve been arguing, board a train in rural China. He wants to fleece a peasant, nicknamed Dumbo for his naiveté, who’s carrying 60,000 yuan and trusts everyone. She wants to protect the hick kid, an act of expiation brought on by prayer and a visit to a temple. Also on board are one of more sets of thieves, including a calculating boss and his femme fatale. … Read more
Jasmine Women
Zhang Ziyi plays the youngest of three generations of women who leads lives in Shanghai. Joan Chen plays the great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother. The film recounts this family, the mistakes they make, and a cycle that the granddaughter breaks out of.
House of Flying Daggers
In 9th century China, a corrupt government wages war against a rebel army called the Flying Daggers. A romantic warrior breaks a beautiful rebel out of prison to help her rejoin her fellows, but things are not what they seem. At its height, the Tang Dynasty was one of the most enlightened empires in Chinese history. But in 859AD, the Dynasty is in decline.
Struggle
This powerful documentary explores the cruel realities of sweatshop labor and workplace injury in China, and one lawyer’s mission to defend worker’s rights.
The Orphan of Anyang
A prostitute from the Northeast, desperate and unable to make ends meet, abandons her baby. An unemployed factory worker decides to take the child for the 200 yuan (about $37 Canadian) a month in child support promised by its mother. His early attempts at child-rearing are somewhat painful to watch, but also charming and amusing. Eventually, he and the mother become friendly and it seems that the child will be raised in a sweetly unorthodox … Read more
The Marriage Certificate
The wife of a prominent psychiatrist can’t find her marriage certificate one day. This “jiehunzheng” is all important. Without it, the family officially has never existed, including the daughter. The couple go on a wild goose chase through the Chinese bureaucracy, meeting catch-22 all the way….they need a certificate to get a new one, etc. They even journey back to the People’s Commune where they met, now the site of modern private enterprises where nobody … Read more
Quitting
An actor becomes increasingly introverted and psychotic and his entire family attempts to intervene. Jia, an actor and former drug addict, battled his addiction to marijuana and heroin for five years from 1992 to 1997.
Purple Sunset
A Soviet Russian lady officer, a Chinese peasant and a Japanese schoolgirl must walk their way out of a forest toward the end of World War II, despite their mutual distrust of one another.
Lan Yu
A love story between a country boy in Beijing to study and a wealthy businessman set against the backdrop of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident
Beijing Bicycle
A seventeen-year-old country boy working in Beijing as a courier has his bicycle stolen, and finds it with a schoolboy his age.
Fleeing by Night
Set in China in the 1930s, the film is about the unsettling relationship between three characters. Ing’er, the daughter of a theatre-owner, welcomes the return of Shao-dung, her fiancee and a fine cellist from America. Shao-dung soon finds himself captivated by the opera “Fleeing By Night” and its celebrated actor, Lin Chung, whose voice seems to articulate something within himself. While Shao-dung attempts to blend eastern and western music, Ing’er becomes torn between her affection … Read more
The Island Tales
A group of disparate characters find themselves trapped overnight on a island somewhere off the coast of mainland China. The circumstances force them to overlook their preconceptions of one another, and they forge a kinship that goes to the heart their identities.
Song of Tibet
Stunningly shot on real locations, Song of Tibet is much as its title sounds – a wistful, sometimes clunky melodrama with lots of ethnographic detail that’s a modern take on the ethnic-minority pics that China has cranked out since the ’50s. Helmer/co-scripter Xie Fei’s eye for colorful realism has always been stronger than his grasp of human drama, and this is no exception. Pic centers on a Tibetan woman, Yixizhuoma, and her turbulent marriage to … Read more
Devils on the Doorstep
During the Japanese occupation of China, two prisoners are dumped in a peasant’s home in a small town. The owner is bullied into keeping the prisoners until the next New Year, at which time they will be collected. The village leaders convene to interrogate the prisoners. The townspeople then struggle to accommodate the prisoners. One is a bellicose Japanese nationalist, the other a nervous translator. Will the townspeople manage to keep the prisoners until the … Read more
The Anarchists
A group of Korean anarchists in 1920s China are determined to overthrow the military and government.
Where Have All the Flowers Gone
Gao Ju (Xia Yu) and Zhang Yang (Pu Shu) were best of friends, but they fall in love with Huanzi (Zhou Xun). Huanzi loves both of them and thus they formed an unbalanced trinity. A simple promise not to meet ever again after college ended up in disaster when Gao cannot resist wooing Huanzi again
I Love You
A young woman who has lost her first love begins a relationship with his best friend, and the two of them attempt to create a baggage-free future.
Ghosts
In the early years of 20th century a strange plague a ghost sightings haunt Phoenix City, a small town in China. A group of doctors is sent to the local church to investigate. While skeptical at first, they soon start to fall victim to the ghosts themselves.
High Sky Summer
The peace of summer life in a village in south-western China is disrupted by the arrival of a film crew which is seeking someone to play the lead in their film. Twelve-year-old Shouxian is excited by the goings-on and constantly hangs around the filmmakers. When he finds out that they’re looking for a boy just his age to play the lead, he willingly does all he can to get the part.
A Pinwheel Without Wind
China 1945, a romance develops between the young Ningjing ZHAO (Xun Zhou) and LIN Shuang-Ran, although they are distant cousins and Shuang-Ran is already betrothed. Each will seek to fight against there destiny to try to live each their romantic feelings.