李米的猜想 | The Equation of Love and Death

When a mysterious death occurs, the lives of five unexpected strangers are suddenly intertwined together. A drug trafficking crime is unveiled, and through the twist and turns of the investigation, their stories unravel, and a bizarre connection is gradually discovered between them. The Equation of Love and Death weaves together three different love stories, examining the different emotional struggles people go through in dealing with pain and lost, and how letting go might just be the hardest thing to do.

Directed by Baoping Cao | Starring : Xun Zhou, Chao Deng, Hanyu Zhang, Baoqiang Wang, Yanhui Wang | Presented at San Sebastian Film Festival, Fribourg Film Festival

明明 | Ming Ming

Ming Ming is a 21st Century martial arts princess and lady Robin Hood who steals for love. Her Prince Charming is D, a maverick fighter and irresistible rogue who posted this challenge to his swarms of female admirers – give him 5 million dollars and he’ll run away with his benefactress to Harbin. Ming Ming meets D’s another girlfriend Nana, who is a virtual look-alike of Ming Ming. Meanwhile, disappears from Shanghai without a trace. The only clue he leaves behind is a cryptic phone message.

Directed by Susie Au | Starring : Xun Zhou, Daniel Wu, Tony Yang, Kristy Yang, Bo-yuan Chan | Presented at Pusan Film Festival, Hong Kong Film Festival

夜宴 | The Banquet

In 907 AD, the Tang Dynasty is in tatters; infighting snarls the imperial family. Crown Prince Wu Luan loves Little Wan, but his father takes her as his Empress. Wu Luan goes into exile, studying dance and music. His uncle murders his father, taking throne and Empress; uncle sends assassins to kill Wu Luan. The Crown Prince eludes death and comes to court. The Emperor arranges for Little Wan’s coronation and dispatches Wu Luan to a distant land; he then calls for a midnight banquet on the 100th day of his rule. Poison, treachery, Wu Luan’s return, and the love of the innocent Qing for Wu Luan set up the final entanglements. No Fortinbras or Horatio lay the dead to rest.

Directed by Xiaogang Feng | Starring : Ziyi Zhang, You Ge, Daniel Wu, Xun Zhou, Xiaoming Huang | Presented at Venice Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Bangkok Film Festival, Palm Springs Film Festival, Portland Film Festival, Seattle Film Festival, Dubai Film Festival

生死劫 | Stolen Life

When Yan’ni starts college she believes she is embarking on a new life away from her family-and she is, but not the new beginning she anticipates. Once at school, she immediately meets Muyu and falls in love with him. What she does not know is that from the moment he met her Muyu began an intricate deception that will lead to the loss of her child and t-he future she believes in.

Directed by Shaohong Li | Starring : Xun Zhou, Jun Wu, Xiaoming Su, Ming Cai, Ni Yan | Presented at Tribeca Film Festival, Kerala Film Festival, Bangkok Film Festival, Wisconsin Film Festival

美人依旧 | The Beauty Remains

Set in 1948 against the backdrop of Communism’s rise, “Fei” is the story of two sisters, Fei and Ying, bound together by the will of their late father, a legendary business entrepreneur, and their shared love for a charismatic ex-boxer, Huang. They are two women whose paths have been dictated by the often cruel decrees of the men their lives–two women who must somehow transcend that influence…or lose everything.

Directed by Ann Hu | Starring : Xun Zhou, Vivian Wu, Zhiwen Wang, Lisa Lu, Lixin Yang | Presented at Cleveland Film Festival

恋爱中的宝贝 | 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

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

香港有个荷里活 | Hollywood Hong Kong

Sex, violence, and pork are the hallmarks of this ultra-black comedy from maverick Hong Kong filmmaker Fruit Chan. Boss Chu is the rotund proprietor of a fast-food stall specializing in pork located in a decaying Hong Kong shanty town. Boss Chu runs the business with his equally porcine sons Tiny and Ming. Living near the pork stall is a teenaged would-be gangster, Wong Chi-keung, who though e-mail makes the acquaintance of a young woman calling herself “Shanghai Angel Hung-Hung”, a prostitute recently arrived in Hong Kong from China. After doing frequent business with Wong, Hung-Hung begins frequenting the pork stall, where she becomes close friends with young Tiny. However, Ming soon develops a more carnal interest in Tiny’s new playmate, and Hung-Hung takes advantage of Ming’s infatuation by seducing him. Boss Chu is also attracted with the young prostitute, and she begins working her charms on the father of the family. Once Wong, Ming, and Boss have all fallen under Hung-Hung’s spell, the three men each begin receiving threatening letters from a lawyer, who claims that Hung-Hung is underage and that statutory rape charges will be filed against them unless they’re willing to pay, leading to some unpleasant visits from the blackmailer’s enforcers. Heunggong Yau Gok Holeiwut is the second film in a planned trilogy about Chinese prostitutes in Hong Kong, following Fruit Chan’s 2000 release Durian, Durian.

Directed by Fruit Chan | Starring : Xun Zhou, Glen Chin, Sai Man Ho, You-Nam Wong, Kit Man Tam | Presented at Venice Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival, Stockholm Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Singapore Film Festival, Cinemanila Film Festival

十七岁的单车 | Beijing Bicycle

Beijing: young men in packs, machismo, class divisions, violence, and indifference. Guei arrives from the country: toothbrushes, hotel foyers, and Qin, a rich neighbor in high heels, dazzle him. He gets a job as a messenger. The company issues him a bike, which he must pay for out of his wages. When it is stolen, Guei hunts for it. A student, Jian, has it; for him, it’s the key to teen society – with his pals and with Xiao, a girl he fancies. Guei finds the bike and stubbornly tries to reclaim it in the face of great odds. But for Jian to lose the bike would mean humiliation. The two young men, and the people around them, are swept up in the youths’ desperation.

Directed by Xiaoshuai Wang | Starring : Lin Cui, Bin Li, Xun Zhou, Yuanyuan Gao, Shuang Li | Presented at Berlin Film Festival, Singapore Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Helsinki Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, San Sebastian Film Festival

苏州河 | Suzhou River

The river Suzhou that flows through Shanghai is a reservoir of filth, chaos and poverty, but also a meeting place for memories and secrets. Lou Ye, who spent his youth on the banks of the Suzhou, shows the river as a Chinese Styx, in which forgotten stories and mysteries come together. Mardar, a motorcycle courier in his mid-twenties, rides all over the city with all kinds of packages for his clients. He knows every inch and is successful thanks to the fact that he never asks questions. One day he is asked by a shady alcohol smuggler to deliver his sixteen-year-old daughter, Moudan, to her aunt. Mardar and Moudan grow fond of each other. But their tender happiness is disrupted when Moudan thinks that Mardar has kidnapped her for a ransom. She is so disappointed in him that she jumps off the bridge into the Suzhou River. Mardar is now suspected of murder. When a couple of years later he comes out of jail, he meets the dancer Meimei, an alter-ego of Moudan, and becomes fascinated by her.

Directed by Ye Lou | Starring : Xun Zhou, Hongshen Jia, Zhongkai Hua, Anlian Yao, An Nai | Presented at Rotterdam Film Festival, Göteborg Film Festival, Paris Film Festival, Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, Reykjavik Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival, Bergen Film Festival, Gij­­ón Film Festival

荆轲刺秦王 | The Emperor and the Assassin

A lavishly produced historical drama from China, The Emperor and the Assassin tells the complex, multi-facetted story of the man who became the first Emperor of a unified China, another man who has sworn to kill him, and a woman who is loved by both men. Late in the Third Century B.C., when China was comprised of seven rival kingdoms, Ying Zheng was the leader of Qin. Ying Zheng had a dream in which he joined together the seven kingdoms into a single utopian state, and taking this as a mandate from God, he invaded the nearby state of Han as the first step toward this goal. However, not everyone in the neighboring states was happy with Ying Zheng’s crusade, which seemed to indicate a lengthy war with many casualties. Lady Zhao, Ying’s lover, devised a scheme to help Ying Zheng take over the nearby and uncooperative state of Yan; she fabricated a fake assassination plot against him, and framed the leader of Yan, once Ying Zheng’s childhood friend, as the man behind the murderous plot. However, Lady Zhao did not choose the would-be assassin wisely; while Jing Ke loved her and was willing to do her bidding, Jing Ke’s previous assassination assignment caused the unintended death of an innocent blind girl, which left him full of regret and a bit unstable. When Jing Ke learned a closely guarded secret about Ying Zheng’s past, he became blindly determined to kill the would-be emperor, whatever the cost.

Directed by Kaige Chen | Starring : Li Gong, Fengyi Zhang, Xuejian Li, Yongfei Gu, Zhiwen Wang | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, AFI Film Festival, Reykjavik Film Festival, Thessaloniki Film Festival

风月 | Temptress Moon

Zhongliang orphaned seek refuge to marry Pang sister show instrument everywhere by the brother-in-law runs and an insult to huff opium toxic waste brother-in-law, fled to Shanghai after accidentally invested greatly sects, gang leader hue seduce wealthy wife hooked and then blackmail their money “demolition white party”. Pang House the classic after death, the eldest Ruyi Li main thing, life Zhongliang back to the Pang government lure wishful cheat Pang property greatly Unexpectedly, two long time to give birth to the truth, and could not bear to deceive wishful the Zhongliang celibacy return Shanghai, and the wishful be greatly received in Shanghai, Seeing the Zhongliang engaged Chaibai Party dirty gray heart of life and death.

Directed by Kaige Chen | Starring : Leslie Cheung, Li Gong, Kevin Lin, Saifei He, Shih Chang | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival

危情少女 | Don’t Be Young

A realistic depiction of the new difficulties people faced in the new era in China.

Directed by Ye Lou | Starring : Ying Qu, Yong You, An Nai, Wenlun Wu, Jie Li | Presented at N/A