Hong Wei Wang

A psychological thriller about a taxi driver battling bureaucracy and legal manipulation in China. (imdb)

Under Jia Zhangke's precisely controlled camera, a ten-year reunion of four classmates in Suzhou, China, modulates imperceptibly from gentle nostalgia--they were poets in university, and now talk investments--to something deeper and fundamentally disturbing. Even Suzhou's Song dynasty canals weep rain for them. (viff.org)

The director of an opera troupe loses all his money, and thus, tells the troupe members to find a new job for a couple months. The movie follows the lives of a few of those troupe members until the director approaches them again.

In the town of Fengjie, which is gradually being submerged by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, two strangers arrive seeking their missing spouses. As they navigate the disappearing landscape, the film captures the intersection of personal heartbreak and massive industrial change. It is a contemplative look at the human cost of progress and the fragility of connections in a shifting world.

Based on the international best-seller, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is set in the early 1970's during the later stages of China's "Cultural Revolution," as two city-bred teenage best friends, Luo (Kun Chen) and Ma (Ye Liu), are sent to a backward mountainous region for Maoist re-education. (Empire Pictures)

In the industrial city of Datong, two disaffected nineteen-year-old friends drift through a landscape of unemployment and aimlessness. They spend their days on motorbikes, obsessed with Western pop culture and short-term thrills to escape their bleak reality. The narrative explores the disillusionment of a generation facing the uncertainties of a rapidly changing, globalized China.

A group of Mainland Chinese villagers struggling with poverty see a potential solution in an organized, illegal journey to a prosperous Western country. They pay handsomely and subject themselves to harsh conditions, crammed into a large truck container for weeks. The film provides a visceral and sobering look at the desperation driving economic migration and the extreme human cost of this clandestine international trade. It is a stark, realistic portrayal of survival and the pursuit of a better life.

A skilled thief, disillusioned with his life, finds a strange sense of purpose and intellectual justification in his criminal acts. His meticulously executed pickpocketing provides a temporary escape from isolation. He drifts between the thrill of the crime and the loneliness of his existence, eventually finding his path intersecting with a young woman who cares for his dying mother. This minimalist, intense character study explores morality, redemption, and the nature of freedom and confinement.

The movie describes the process by which a young man coming to Beijing from Kanan looking for a better life loses his hopes and decides to go back... (KG)