杏花三月天 | The Story of Xinghua

This Chinese melodrama presents an allegory tinged with feminism with it’s portrayal of life and free enterprise in a modern, liberalized Chinese mountain village. Wanglai is the shady town grocer who steals stones from the Great Wall to sell as souvenirs. His neighbor Fulin is nothing like him. Fulin is sensitive, educated and spiritual. He makes his living planting saplings. Wanglai’s store-bought bride Xinghua cannot bear him children; he therefore, frequently batters her then cheats upon her. In the gentle Fulin Xinghua finds a soul-mate. Fulin too, is drawn to her and shyly tells her so. The two passionately consummate their love during a rainstorm. Xinghua gets pregnant and wants to divorce her cruel husband. Fulin becomes uneasy. Though he is more liberal than Wanglai, he is still bound by tradition. When Wanglai discovers he has been cuckolded he ruins Fulin’s plantation and beats Fulin and then Xinghua mercilessly. He wants her child regardless of the father, but she destroys him by pointing out that he, not she, is the infertile one.

Directed by Li Yin | Starring : Wenli Jiang, Guoli Zhang, Shaojun Tian, Haiyan Zhang, Xingli Niu | Presented at Cannes Film Festival

大太监李莲英 | Li Lianying, the Imperial Eunuch

Tian admits that this chamber epic was not a ‘personal’ project; for a film which began shooting only a few months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, it certainly feels more like a flight into history than even an oblique response to the moment. Spanning the last five decades of the Qing Dynasty, it centres on the oddly affectionate relationship between Empress Dowager Cixi and her chief eunuch; the stars were a real life couple at the time. The often filmed historical facts are rehearsed efficiently enough: the folly of deflecting naval funds to the building of the Summer Palace, puppet emperor Guangxu’s ill fated bid for autonomy as a reformist and so on. But the film is vindicated by its prime mover Jiang Wen’s colossal performance as Li; no other actor has ever gone deeper into the implications of castration and living as a neutered animal.

Directed by Zhuangzhuang Tian | Starring : Wen Jiang, Xiaoqing Liu, Fan Xu, Xu Zhu, Jiali Ding | Presented at Berlin Film Festival