夜车 | Night Train

What threatens to be a fairly inconspicuous oddball drama, opening as it does with unsmiling court bailiff Wu Hongyan traveling to an out-of-town singles dance which ends in a predictably uncomfortable fashion, soon turns in to a rather nasty game of sexual cat-and-mouse as she falls in lust with the husband of one of the women she has had to help detain. Having flown under the radar of Chinese censors, it’s a slow and often painful film about a woman in search of love and affection in all the wrong places. Be warned: just as you think you’re on the home straight, Yinan inserts a repulsive, near-unwatchable scene of a carthorse being flayed to (what looks like) death; a cruelly over-egged metaphor if there ever was one.

Directed by Yi’nan Diao | Starring : Dan Liu, Liang Qi, Zhengjia Wang, Yongsheng Li, Halyan Meng | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Athens Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, Warsaw Film Festival, London Film Festival, Buenos Aires Film Festival

制服 | Uniform

Economic unrest roils central China’s Shaanxi Province: local factories are merging, thugs threaten managers, personnel records get lost, and workers are without protections such as health insurance. The police and much of society are surly. Xiao Jian, a mild young man whose father is ill, works in the family street stall doing pressing and tailoring. A laundered police-officer’s shirt goes uncollected, and Xiao Jian puts it on: it opens doors. Wearing it, he chats up a clerk, Zheng Shasha, and takes her out. He extracts fines from drivers who violate traffic laws. In these tough times, he’s not the only one with two identities.

Directed by Yi’nan Diao | Starring : Kai Han, Hongli Liang, Hua Qin, Xueqiong Zeng | Presented at Vancouver Film Festival, Pusan Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Philadelphia Film Festival, London Film Festival

明日天涯 | All Tomorrow’s Parties

In a post-apocalyptic 21st century, Continental Asia lives under the rule of the political and religious sect Gui Dao, which blends Maoist rhetorics with Buddhist iconography… Zhuai and his younger brother Mian are arrested and deported to a camp called Prosperity for re-education. Survival in the camp means hunger, bureaucratic rules, degradation and humiliation. After the catastrophic fall of the sect, the guards of the camp escape, leaving the inmates “free”. Zhuai and Mian wander around before leaving the camp together with beautiful Xuelan and her baby. They find themselves in the desert wastelands of their post-war post-industrial world. They try to rediscover everyday life in a shabby apartment of an abandoned mining town. Are their dreams only of a virtual future?

Directed by Nelson Yu Lik-wai | Starring : Wei Wei Zhao, Yi’nan Diao, Yong-won Cho, Ren Na  | Presented at Cannes Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, Sitges Film Festival, Entrevues Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Buenos Aires Film Festival, Hong Kong Film Festival, Warsaw Film Festival, Chicago Film Festival