IFFR 2008

Yang Yanjin

A disconcerting and exhilarating attack on both narrative cinema and politically repressive master narratives. A victim of persecution pitches a screenplay of his fractured life to a master director. Romance, cross-dressing, experimentalism: a masterpiece of formal and stylistic daring.

Cinema Regained: Rediscovering the 4th Generation

The Alley

Teng Wenji

A hidden masterpiece: one part rural elegy, one part urban romance, forged together in an editing tour de force. Rarely screened in China or outside, this story of a fisherman’s daughter caught between factory work and feudal forced marriage is simply astonishing.

At the Beach

Xie Fei

Urban alienation and despair mark this dark, politically daring story of an ex-con (the great Chinese actor Jiang Wen) with no home to return to. Xie Fei’s gritty tone and subject blaze the trail for the Sixth Generation’s 'underground' provocations.

Black Snow

Wu Yigong

Wu Yonggang

Wu Yigong transmutes political protest into lyric poetry in this tale of the poet Qiushi, who is captured by Cultural Revolution radicals, travelling down the Yangtze River towards prison. A cinema poem that revives melodramatic purity, transmuting tears into a defiant, ultimately triumphant idealism.

Evening Rain

Yan Xueshu

Two mismatched farming couples experience both sexual and social change in 1980s China. Husband-swapping and entrepreneurial zeal fuse in this superbly shot, wittily realised take on a country where rambunctious capitalism and desiring bodies are two sides of the same coin.

In the Wild Mountains

Huang Jianzhong

Zhang Zheng

Wound up to a maximum fever pitch, fusing melodrama, romance and war epic, Little Flower is a big movie in every sense. Joan Chen became a star for this patriotic adventure film, which deftly straddles ideological and entertainment cinema expansively and exuberantly.

Little Flower

One of the greatest works of Chinese cinema, this lyrical masterpiece recreates 1920s Beijing through the eyes of a preternaturally intelligent young girl. Perfectly balanced, exquisitely modulated, an ode to and lament for an achingly beautiful past forever lost in history.

My Memories of Old Beijing

Cong Lianwen

A brilliant, blackly comic script and the subtle comic genius of star Zhu Xu mark this as one of the best tragi-comedies of post-liberation Chinese cinema. Three neighbours employ wit, feeling, and fervour, to outwit, for a time, nasty Red Guards and corrupt officials.

A Narrow Lane Celebrity

Wu Tian Ming

Intense, visceral, powerfully physical, this is a tale of three tough survivors sailing a lumber raft past villages caught up in political violence in the early 70s. A huge popular success on its release, Wu Tianming’s film captures the fighting spirit of a generation unwilling to admit defeat.

River Without Buoys

Zhang Nuanxin

This lyrical, gently eroticised coming-of-age drama of a young Chinese woman 'sent down' to live in an ethnic minority village in remote southwestern China was the favourite movie of Chinese filmgoers in the 1980s. Romantic realism with Chinese characteristics.

Sacrificed Youth

Absurdist political melodrama with experimental flourishes. A reporter dedicated to truth is lured into a nightmare of political propaganda from which mental disintegration offers the only way out.

Troubled Laughter

Huang Shuqin

A powerfully unorthodox story of an opera actress whose onstage persona is the male underworld god Zhong Kui. Part biopic, part fantasy, part modernist psychological mystery, Huang Shuqin dramatises gender as a crisis, with brilliant confidence and technical bravura.

IFFR 2025
30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025