亲密敌人 | Dear Enemy

With the lithium market in a dip, UA Capital Investment Banking, led by hotshot managing director Derek Lee, brokers a merger offer to Brandon Mining, one of the world’s big three lithium producers along with Anchor Exploration and Clayton Global. Investigative journalist Henry Ma, who runs financial blog Golden Touch, gets wind of the plan and makes it public. UA’s client is believed to be Anchor, and Brandon’s CEO Owenconsiders it a hostile takeover. His financial advisor is Derek’s onetime lover, Amy Liang, associate managing director of Global Alliance Investment Banking, who finally split up with Derek while on holiday together in Australia 10 months ago, frustrated by his workaholism. Amy’s old friend Rebecca, who works on Derek’s team, advises her not to do battle with Derek, for her own good, but Amy ignores her advice. The cat-and-mouse game starts with Amy and Derek finding themselves both on the same flight to London; Derek claims he is visiting his elder sister, clothes designer Lucy Lee , but both are trying to meet the elusive Chen Jiandong, Brandon’s biggest shareholder, to gauge where he stands. Amy finally tracks Chen down in South Africa but, as with Derek in London, he’s non-committal. Amy next chases a white knight but the move is stymied by Derek. Suspecting he has a mole on her team, she discovers who it is and plants false information. Realising he’s been outsmarted, Derek has a frank talk with Amy but they end up quarreling again, despite their residual feelings for each other. In a bid to rescue his position, Derek hires Henry to do some investigating for him.

Directed by Jinglei Xu | Starring : Jinglei Xu, Stanley Huang, Gigi Leung, Aarif Rahman, Christy Chung | Presented at N/A

将爱情进行到底 | Eternal Moment

China, the modern day. I: Yang Zheng recalls how he graduated in 1999, contacted his onetime college girlfriend Wenhui in the US in 2001 and married her when she returned to China in 2003. Since he has become a successful CEO, she has become a full-time housewife. But one evening, when he comes home intending to watch his favourite sports programme on TV as usual, suddenly he doesn’t recognise the woman he married. And when he moves out to a hotel, she doesn’t come looking for him. II: Wenhui, divorced and with two young twin sons, is working as a shopgirl in Shanghai, while Yang Zheng, about to be divorced, is a car mechanic in Beijing. Neither has seen the other for over a decade, but they both attend a 10th anniversary college reunion in Shanghai organised by their friend Jiawei. They end up spending a whole night together, recalling past times and re-igniting old fires. III: Yang Zheng traces a drunken happy-birthday call from Wenhui to Bordeaux, and flies from Beijing to see her for the first time in over a decade. At Bordeaux train station, Wenhui is waiting to welcome Chuchu, the mistress of her boss Pan Xiao,  head of specialist wine retailer YH Global. Wenhui introduces Yang as her boyfriend. She later tells Yang that Pan is actually her husband, not her boss. With Pan temporarily away, Wenhui, Yang and Chuchu spend time together.

Directed by Yibai Zhang | Starring : Jinglei Xu, Yapeng Li, Xuebing Wang, Chapman To, Jie He | Presented at N/A

杜拉拉升职记 | Go Lala Go

Making a fresh start, and believing that plain hard work will pay off, 27-year-old Du Lala joins the China office of high-powered US company DG Technology as an assistant in its personnel department. She is soon befriended by Helen, secretary of sales director David, and later by the workaholic David himself, after he ends his clandestine office affaire with assistant personnel manager Rose. Lala shows initiative when CEO Howard orders the office to be refurbished and, in her first big step up the ladder, becomes David’s personal assistant. Unlike him, however, she finds it hard to separate her private and professional lives.

Directed by Jinglei Xu | Starring : Jinglei Xu, Karen Mok, Stanley Huang, Pace Wu, Ai Li | Presented at N/A

梦想照进现实 | Dreams May Come

Actress-turned-director and first-time producer Xu Jinglei presents her third feature film, titled Dreams May Come. Like her widely acclaimed directorial piece Letter From An Unknown Woman, Dreams May Come also stars Xu as the female lead. Written by top Chinese novelist Wang Shuo, witty dialogues between a TV actress and a TV director occupy over 90% of the film’s running time. The actress is tired of good-girl roles in TV dramas and wants to quit, but the director persuades her not to… As a director and actress, Xu Jinglei has woven in certain autobiographical elements, especially about the struggles of an actress and a director

Directed by Jinglei Xu | Starring : Jinglei Xu, Tongsheng Han | Presented at Thessaloniki Film Festival

一个陌生女人的来信 | Letter from an Unknown Woman

A man rides home through a war-ridden city. A letter waits for him at home. It’s a letter written by a woman before her death. In it, she tells him that she loves him, a lifelong passion that hasn’t lessened with time, but of which he knew nothing. She recounts their short but passionate young love – to him, simply one more brief romance among many; the difficulties she had in raising their child; and their final meeting, at which he didn’t recognize her. Now that she has lost her son (the only thread linking her to the man she loved), she no longer has the strength to live on… Shaken by the letter, the man searches his memory for the nameless woman.

Directed by Jinglei Xu | Starring : Jinglei Xu, Wen Jiang, Feihu Sun, Xiaoming Su, Jue Huang | Presented at San Sebastian Film Festival, Seattle Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival

我和爸爸 | My Father and I

After Xiao Yu’s mother died in an accident, she moved back to live with her birth father who she knows little about. Gradually, they grew to know each other and to accept each other for who they are. They share the unconditional love between a daughter and a father through their happiness and their difficulties.

Directed by Jinglei Xu | Starring : Jinglei Xu, Daying Ye, Xiaoming Su, Qiu Qiu, Yuan Zhang | Presented at Toronto Film Festival

我爱你 | I Love You

This story is based on a novel by Wang Shuo. A young couple have got together from first meet to marriage. DaoJi, she is very sensitive to her feeling and filled with aspiration to succeed and love…after honeymoon, they begin to go shopping at an agricultural market with basket as others. Jealousy, arguments are a relief of tedium in their insipid life. Conflicts, run away and frenzy are only ripples in dead pond.

Directed by Yuan Zhang | Starring : Jinglei Xu, Dawei Tong, Xuebing Wang, Peng Du, Juan Pan | Presented at Sundance Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Göteborg Film Festival, Fribourg Film Festival, Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival, Thessaloniki Film Festival

开往春天的地铁 | Spring Subway

Director Zhang Yibai makes an impressive debut with Spring Subway, a stylish urban romance about the silent suffering of a modern Chinese couple. Geng Le is Jianbin, a recently unemployed Beijing urbanite whose marriage to designer Xiaohui is hitting a difficult patch after nearly seven years of matrimony. Xiaohui finds friendship – and possibly more – with a customer, while Jianbin keeps up appearances by going to work every morning and riding the Beijing subway all day. On the subway, life continues for him, as he views various couples falling in and out of love. He even becomes emotionally involved with a schoolteacher, and slowly the wall of silence between the married couple becomes ever more impenetrable. Zhang Yibai finds rich territory for exploration among these emotionally-stilted modern Chinese, who might be able to make their lives work if only they could communicate. Shot with stylish, enthralling cinematic panache, Spring Subway is an offbeat and stunning work from an important new voice in Chinese cinema.

Directed by Yibai Zhang | Starring : Geng Le, Jinglei Xu, Yuanyuan Gao, Yang Zhang, Lan Ke | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Thessaloniki Film Festival

花眼 | Dazzling

Acclaimed avant-garde filmmaker Li Xin presents his second feature, Dazzling, an imaginative and beautifully-made film about two love-seeking angels and a lonely theater usher longing to return to the light. Wu Gang (Wu Lala) is a theater usher who sticks to the shadows. A pair of angels arrives, seeking five love connections to return them to Heaven, and Wu Gang obliges them by finding love in his daydreams. Slowly, the people encountered by Wu Gang at his job begin to invade his dreams, and soon they become pivotal players in Wu Gang’s intricate, imaginative fantasies of love. All the while, Wu Gang waits in the park for his own love to arrive. Filled with lovely images and inventive storytelling, Dazzling is a unique and uncommonly poetic film that speaks to the emotions and imagination of its audience.

Directed by Xin Lee | Starring : Lala Wu, Jinglei Xu, Xuebing Wang, Ting Mei, Juan Li | Presented at Berlin Film Festival, Portland Film Festival

爱情麻辣烫 | Spicy Love Soup

Spicy Love Soup starts with a young couple eating sweet (or sour) and spicy soup from a two-sided bowl shaped in a Yin and Yang pattern. Until the couple’s wedding at the end of the film, Spicy Love Soup intermittently shows six different episodes about different generations’ relationships. Love can be sweet, sour, or spicy. And, you’ll taste all those emotions from this contemporary Chinese film.

Directed by Yang Zhang | Starring : Jinglei Xu, Cunxin Pu, Yuanyuan Gao, Liping Lü, Tao Guo | Presented at Changchun Film Festival, Tokyo Film Festival, Hawaii Film Festival