过界 | Bends

bends

Bends straddles the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border and tells the story of Anna, an affluent housewife and Fai, her chauffeur, and their unexpected friendship as they each negotiate the pressures of Hong Kong life and the city’s increasingly complex relationship to mainland China. Fai is struggling to find a way to bring his pregnant wife and daughter over the Hong Kong border from Shenzhen so as to avoid the 2nd child penalty in China, even though he crosses the border easily every day working as a chauffeur for Anna. Anna, in contrast, is struggling to keep up the façade of her ostentatious lifestyle, after the disappearance of her husband, amid financial turmoil. Their two lives collide in a common space, the car.

Directed by Flora Lau | Starring : Carina Lau, Kun Chen, Yuan Tian, Lawrence Cheng, Stephanie Che | Presented at Cannes Film Festival

让子弹飞 | Let the Bullets Fly

Let the Bullets Fly

Set during the Age of the Warlords in the 1920s, this comic western is the highest grossing Chinese film ever. When circumstances force an outlaw to impersonate a county governor and clean up a corrupt town, the Robin Hood figure finds himself in a showdown with the local “godfather”. Full of surprises and grounded with a smart, humorous script, Let the Bullets Fly’s battles are fought with guns and wit.a

Directed by Wen Jiang | Starring : Wen Jiang, Yun-Fat Chow, You Ge, Bing Shao, Fan Liao | Presented at Tribeca Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival, London Film Festival

恋爱中的宝贝 | Baober in Love

Baober in Love

Liu Zhi, a young man living a depressed life from his marriage with a dominating girl, met Baober (an ageless young girl) on Beijing street one day. They fell in love and started to live a strange, mysterious life…

Directed by Shaohong Li | Starring : Xun Zhou, Kun Chen, Jue Huang, Fan Liao, Gang Wang | Presented at Telluride Film Festival, Ghent Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival, London Film Festival, Thessaloniki Film Festival

巴尔扎克与小裁缝 | Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Balzac

In 1971 China, in the lingering grip of the cultural revolution, two university students, Luo and Ma, are sent to a mountain mining village as part of their reeducation duty to purge them of their classical western oriented education. Amid the backbreaking work and stifling ignorance of the community, the two boys find that music, and the presence of the beautiful local young women are the only pleasant things in their miserable life. However, none compare to the young seamstress granddaughter of the local tailor. Stealing a departing student’s secret cache of forbidden books of classic western literature such as the works of Honore de Balzac, they set about to woo her and teach her things she had never imagined. In doing so, they start a journey that would profoundly change her perspective on her world and teach the boys about the power of literature and their own ability to change their world in truly revolutionary ways.

Directed by Sijie Dai | Starring : Xun Zhou, Ye Liu, Kun Chen, Zhijun Cong, Hongwei Wang | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Montréal Film Festival, Marrakech Film Festival, Chicago Film Festival, Ghent Film Festival, AFI Film Festival, Palm Springs Film Festival, Göteborg Film Festival, Istanbul Film Festival, Moscow Film Festival, Auckland Film Festival, Copenhagen Film Festival, Milwaukee Film Festival