One Summer [一个夏天] (2015)

Odyssey: a Chinese cinema season The ongoing Odyssey Chinese cinema season (presented by UK-China Film Collab) involves over 60 films (over half are short films) in 8 curated sections, with 10 discussion panels and Q&A sessions with many directors. The selection of features tends strongly to the art house end of the spectrum and includes…

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall [整形医生] (2020)

Dr. Han gives you what God owes you - the moto over the entrance to the plastic surgery clinic This documentary (Plastic Surgeon in Chinese) opens in striking fashion in Dr. Han's plastic surgery clinic in Jinan (Shandong) with a vlogger (and the clinic) live streaming her breast enlargement operation. Later we see a beauty…

Leave Me Alone [不想一个人] (2021)

Leave Me Alone (which weirdly reverses the Chinese title I don't want to be alone) features Loong [Fandy Fan] who recruits and manages a small team of 'escorts' and is generally a hustler working with small time gangster Chao  [the always reliable Chen Yi-Wen]. Loong is in a relationships of sorts with his half-sister Chin-sha…

So Long Summer Vacation [暑期何漫漫] (2022)

It's 1990 and twelve year old Chen Xiaojin [excellently played by Tian Siyuan] lives in a small town in central Henan province (shot in Tangyin county in northern Henan). He's finally on his summer holidays but with both parents had at work, there's not much to do during the hot summer days. His father [Sun…

Hard Love [“炼”爱] (2021)

A documentary which looks at the lives of five single women in China in or approaching their thirties. Some are separated (or divorced?) while most have yet to marry, one has a child. There is former Uber-executive Maggie who, in the course of the film, makes her way to a clinic in San Francisco to…

Terrorizers [青春弒戀] (2021)

Far East Film Festival 24 Terrorizers is one of the best films shown at FEFF 24. It is a complex exploration of relationships and self in a large modern metropolis. The film is divided into four parts (the last very short) named after the four main protagonists (although each part does not focus solely on…

Streetwise [街娃儿] (2021)

Far East Film Festival 24 Streetwise (also known as Remainder and (in Sichuanese) Gaey Wa’r) is a striking film and a refreshing change from the dross which makes up most of current Chinese cinema. Set in a small riverside Sichuan city, twenty year old Dongzi [Li Jiuxiao] works (not very successfully) as enforcer for a…

Chinese films at the Far East Film Festival, Udine, 2022

Back in the Teatro Nuovo for the first time since 2019, FEFF 24 returned to close to normal, masks and COVID rules notwithstanding. And the number of mainland Chinese films on display returned to broadly pre-COVID levels with 8 mainland and 2 HK/Chinese movies (see below). Most have been reviewed elsewhere on this blog (I…

Return to Dust [隐入尘烟] (2022)

Far East Film Festival 24 A movie to restore your faith in Chinese cinema. A 2 hour plus film about a couple living in poverty in rural Gansu (set in the director's home Gaotai county) may sound worthy but dull. But this is compelling cinema. Director Li Ruijin's last movie was the 2017 big-budget Walking…

Nice View [奇迹·笨小孩] (2022)

Far East Film Festival 24 Gen Xi living the Chinese dream. A new and strikingly different film by Dying to Survive director Wen Muye released for the 2022 Chinese New Year. Set in 2013 (just after the accession of the Chairman of Everything) in fishing village-turned-megalopolis Shenzhen, twenty year old Jing Hao [Jackson Yee] runs…