Despite its conspicuous melodrama and emotional manipulation, this highly popular Teochew film transcends its shortcomings through the deeply resonating power of qiaopi, diaspora, and the enduring historical pull of Nanyang.
Winner of Best Director at the Berlinale, this assured work about growing up in a Chinese village in 1991 as the winds of modernity begin to change lives, reminds one of a cross between Zhang Yimou’s early rural dramas and Yang’s Yi Yi.
Wang Bing adopts his observational documentary style for this rare if not always compelling dramatisation of Mao’s labour camps in the Gobi Desert, as countless starving men faced an unending sense of bleakness, futility and toil.
A small-town doctor embarks on a journey to find his nephew in Bi Gan’s formidable meditation on time and memory, where the director functions as a medium in which his alchemistic ways reveal moments of pure symbolic and poetic wonder.
Wang draws intimate links between the Chinese and their land post-1949 Chinese Civil War in this reflective and dreamlike work from the perspective of a boy who longs for a water toy gun from his late grandfather.
Doesn’t add any real value to Jia’s impressive body of work, this tonally jarring montage of new material and unused scenes from past projects sees Zhao Tao playing a silent woman navigating a quarter century of longing, regrets and opportunities in a modernising China.
Raw and intimate, Lou’s latest is a meta-filmic, time-travelling chronicle back to the COVID-19 pandemic as he reflects on the angst and helplessness of not being able to complete a film, yet it is also surprisingly an emotional work of gratitude.
Grand yet intimate, this Cannes Un Certain Regard award winner, about a man who strikes up a friendship with a black stray dog in a small town, mostly avoids overt sentimentalism in its portrayal of changing times in rural China.
Youth labour in textile factories in China’s Zhejiang province is the central focus of Wang Bing’s social realist documentary that shows us what it’s like to be toiling away to make ends meet.
The hopes of transcending their abject youth emanate from the trio of well-realised characters in Chen’s assured fourth feature, set and shot in far-flung Northeast China.
Eternality Tan 