Spring Tide [春潮]

Released: 2019  Viewed: February 2020, Dublin International Film Festival After her off-beat and excellent independent film, Longing for the Rain, comes this equally good, if somewhat more mainstream, contribution from director Yang Lina. The films revolves around the relationships between three generations of women in one family. Guo Jianbo [Hao Lei of Mystery  and Summer Palace]…

If you are happy [学区房72小时]

Released: 2019 Viewed: February 2020, Dublin International Film Festival Fu Zhong [Guan Xuan] is a university lecturer and is living the middle class dream (or nightmare). Obsessed with getting a place for his preschool daughter ChengCheng in a top primary school, he is furiously searching for a house in the school’s catchment area (hence the…

The Wild Goose Lake [南方车站的聚会]

Released: 2019 Viewed: February 2020 Two strangers meet in the driving rain outside a train station (shot in Wuhan), He, Zhou Zenong [Hu Ge], is a criminal on the run from the law, while she, Liu Ai’ai [Gui Lunmei], is a ‘bathing beauty’ (aka prostitute) who normally works at Wild Goose Lake (the Chinese title…

MeiLi [美丽]

Released: 2018 Viewed: February 2019 David Goodis goes to Changchun.  Goodis is famous for his novels of hope and despair set in post war USA (several of which became classic film noirs). Despite their troubled lives, Goodis’ characters retained the hope for a better life even if despair usually triumphed in the end. So it…

Bloody Daisy [追凶十九年]

Released: 2019  Viewed February 2020 The film [Nineteen Years of Pursuit in Chinese] opens in dramatic fashion with one character crashing out a window to his death. It then flashes back to 1999 to a small city in northern China where Liu Yibo [Wang Longzheng] is a detective assigned to investigate a brutal murder. A…

Better Days [少年的你]

Released: 2019  Viewed: January 2020 The films opens in 2011 with a striking exposition of school bullying set in a large Chinese city. One victim of bullying jumps to her death. While many of the students take pictures on their smart phones, only Chen Nian [Zhou Dongyu] moves forward to cover the body (below). A…