无人驾驶 | Driverless

Jia chases love and wanders the streets to defy her father. Zhi Xiong lives a comfortable middle class life, but married life does not go well. Zhi Xiong has an affair with former girlfriend Xiao Yun. Wang Yao lost his daughter in a car accident and a women attempts to help him, but ends up getting hurt. Their interwoven stories all unravel through one accident at an intersection.

Directed by Yang Zhang | Starring : Ye Liu, Yuanyuan Gao, Jianbin Chen, Xiao Ran Li, Luodan Wang | Presented at Shanghai Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival

我们天上见 | We’ll Meet in Heaven

At age 40, mainland Chinese actress Jiang Wenli makes a smooth segue behind the camera with autobiographical coming-of-ager “Lan.” Cultural Revolution-set tale of a young girl, whose dream of becoming a champion gymnast is scuppered by the realities of everyday life and family background, is handled with grace and feeling, and is notably light on the political cliches besetting stories of the era. The audience-award winner at this year’s Pusan fest, this unabashedly old-school movie (in the best sense) is ripe for festival and Euro TV exposure, with some limited theatrical potential as well.

Directed by Wenli Jiang | Starring : Xu Zhu, Jun Yao, Ye Liu, Zhu Yinuo, Sichun Ma | Presented at Pusan Film Festival, Dubai Film Festival

南京！南京！ | City of Life and Death

Nanjing, 1937. The third film from award-winning Sixth Generation director Lu Chuan, City of Life and Death is a devastating account of the massacre that occurred during the Sino-Japanese War when Japanese troops took the city of Nanjing in December 1937, a tragedy remembered as the Rape of Nanking. Shot completely in black and white, this powerful war drama unflinchingly captures the shocking violence and brutality of the Nanjing massacre, from the mass executions of POWs to the raping and slaughtering of civilians, while providing a deeply human portrait of both the victims and the perpetrators. Rendered in many shades of gray, City of Life and Death touches on the different people whose lives are destroyed by the war: the Chinese soldiers who gave their lives, the foreign missionaries who sheltered refugees, the comfort women, the Chinese civilians, and the Japanese soldiers. In a surprising move for a Mainland Chinese film about the Rape of Nanking, City of Life and Death is told primarily from the perspective of a Japanese soldier, who witnesses, commits, and abhors the atrocities of his army. By choosing to humanize rather than demonize, Lu Chuan offers an all the more devastating memory of the Nanjing massacre, and the people who lived and died in the City of Life and Death.

Directed by Chuan Lu | Starring : Ye Liu, Yuanyuan Gao, Hideo Nakaizumi, Wei Fan, Lan Qin | Presented at Edinburgh Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, San Sebastian Film Festival, Athens Film Festival, Oslo Film Festival, Hamptons Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival, Warsaw Film Festival, London Film Festival, AFI Film Festival, Mar del Plata Film Festival, Palm Springs Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Seattle Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, Helsinki Film Festival

满城尽带黄金甲 | Curse of the Golden Flower

China, Later Tang Dynasty, 10th Century. On the eve of the Chong Yang Festival, golden flowers fill the Imperial Palace. The Emperor returns unexpectedly with his second son, Prince Jai. His pretext is to celebrate the holiday with his family, but given the chilled relations between the Emperor and the ailing Empress, this seems disingenuous. For many years, the Empress and Crown Prince Wan, her stepson, have had an illicit liaison. Feeling trapped, Prince Wan dreams of escaping the palace with his secret love Chan, the Imperial Doctor’s daughter. Meanwhile, Prince Jai, the faithful son, grows worried over the Empress’s health and her obsession with golden chrysanthemums. Could she be headed down an ominous path? The Emperor harbors equally clandestine plans; the Imperial Doctor is the only one privy to his machinations.

Directed by Yimou Zhang | Starring : Yun-Fat Chow, Li Gong, Ye Liu, Jay Chou, Dahong Ni | Presented at Glasgow Film Festival

无极 | The Promise

When the world was young, laid a Kingdom between the Land of Snow and the Barbarian Territory where gods and men lived side by side and promises were lies. When the poor and starving orphaned girl Qingcheng meets the Goddess Manshen, she accepts to become the wealthy beauty of beauties with the curse that she would lose every man she loves, unless three things happen: snow falls in the spring, time moves backwards and the dead comes back to life. Years later, the slave Kunlun helps the Great General Master of the Crimson Armor Guangming to defeat a barbarian army with almost seven times more warriors, and Kunlun becomes his slave. When Guangming is wounded, he asks Kunlun to wear his armor and save the king from the cruel Duke of the North Wuhuan that put the Imperial City under siege with his army. However, Kunlun kills the king to save Princess Qingcheng and promises her to never let her die. Princess Qingcheng falls in love for the man of the crimson armor that she believes is General Guangming. When Snow Wolf saves Kunlun and brings him to the Land of Snow, he recollects his childhood when his mother and sister were killed by the evil Wuhuan. Kunlun decides to return to the Kingdom to face Wuhuan and fight for his love.

Directed by Kaige Chen | Starring : Dong-gun Jang, Hiroyuki Sanada, Cecilia Cheung, Nicholas Tse, Ye Liu | Presented at Berlin Film Festival, Moscow Film Festival

茉莉花开 | Jasmine Women

Jasmine Women is adapted from the novel Women’s Life by the famous writer Su Tong, whose literary works have been turned into many films, among them Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern. Jasmine Women follows a family whose female members from three different generations all experience frustration in marriage, as if the family is cursed. In the 1930s, Mo, brought up by her single mother, develops a romance with the studio manager and is dumped after she gets pregnant. She blames her daughter Li for all her miseries. In the 1960s, Li can no longer put up with her mother Mo and marries a construction worker. Being impotent, Li adopts a child from the orphan named Hua. In the 1980s, Li suspects that her husband has an incestuous affair with Hua. Her husband commits suicide and Li becomes schizophrenic. Hua’s marriage is no better than her mother’s or grandmother’s – her husband finds a mistress and she decides to divorce him although she has already conceived his child…

Directed by Yong Hou | Starring : Ziyi Zhang, Joan Chen, Wen Jiang, Ye Liu, Yi Lu | Presented at Shanghai Film Festival, Tokyo Film Festival, Iceland Film Festival, Chicago Film Festival, Thessaloniki Film Festival

恋之风景 | The Floating Landscape

Maan has recently lost her lover, Sam, a painter who died tragically of an incurable disease. Before his death, he was remembering a beautiful landscape from the days when he was still a boy living in Qingdao in China. Maan goes to Qingdao to find this landscape. There, she meets Lit, a postman who will help her to find that place. A relationship grows between Maan and Lit but she can’t forget the love she had for Sam.

Directed by Miu-suet Lai | Starring : Kar Yan Lam, Ekin Cheng, Ye Liu, Jin Su, Jue Huang | Presented at Venice Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival, Cinemanila Film Festival

紫蝴蝶 | Purple Butterfly

1928. Manchuria. Itami, a young Japanese man, falls deeply in love with Cynthia, a beautiful Chinese girl. Their brief happiness ends when he is called home for his military service and they are forced to part. Returning sorrowfully from the train station where she has bid her lover farewell, Cynthia witnesses her brother’s bloody murder at the hands of Japanese right-wing extremists. Three years later, Shanghai has been unofficially occupied by Japan. The city is tense, rife with violence and barely contained anarchy. Cynthia – now known as Ding Hui – is working for Purple Butterfly, a resistance group planning to assassinate Yamamoto, head of the Japanese secret service. Itami is also in Shanghai, operating as a secret agent and reporting directly to Yamamoto. Arriving at Shanghai station to meet his fiancée, Szeto, a young Chinese man, is mistaken by the assembled resistance fighters for the assassin they have engaged to eliminate Yamamoto. Violence erupts and Szeto’s fiancée is shot dead in the crossfire. Szeto escapes with the Purple Butterfly members, all of whom believe him to be the hired killer. Only Ding Hui realises the truth… Thus three destinies are linked by chance, and three fates set in tragic motion.

Directed by Ye Lou | Starring : Ziyi Zhang, Ye Liu, Yuanzheng Feng, Tôru Nakamura, Bingbing Li | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Munich Film Festival, Toronto 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

蓝宇 | Lan Yu

Beijing, 1988. On the cusp of middle-age, Chen Handong has known little but success all his life. The eldest son of a senior government bureaucrat, he heads a fast-growing trading company and plays as hard as he works. His loyal lieutenant Liu Zheng is one of the few who know that Handong¿s tastes run to boys more than girls. Lan Yu is a country boy, newly arrived in Beijing to study architecture. More than most students, he is short of money and willing to try anything to earn some. He has run into Liu Zheng, who pragmatically suggests that he could prostitute himself for one night to a gay pool-hall and bar owner. But Handong happens to be in the pool-hall that evening, and he nixes the deal. He takes Lan Yu home himself, and gives the young man what turns out to be a life-changing sexual initiation.

Directed by Stanley Kwan | Starring : Ye Liu, Jun Hu, Jin Su, Yongning Zhang, Shuang Li | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Brisbane Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, London Film Festival, Thessaloniki Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Singapore Film Festival, Buenos Aires Film Festival, Cinemanila Film Festival, Febio Film Festival

那山、那人、那狗 | Postmen in the Mountains

An old postman has spent his whole life delivering mail to the mountain of Hunan and is about to retire. His only son is due to take over his duties. As father and son journey through the mountains, the son begins to appreciate the toil and burden his father has to bear as postman for the villagers, and the old postman is also deeply moved as his son relates his mother’s anxiety as she waits for him to return home from every trip.

Directed by Jianqi Huo | Starring : Ye Liu, Rujun Ten, Hao Chen, Hao Dang, Yeheng Gong | Presented at Montréal Film Festival