Grandma’s New World [外婆的新世界] (2023) ep. 1-5

This drama series (18 episodes of 1 hour or under) has recently finished airing on iQiyi. Unlike my normal crime focus, this is a female-centred drama which (based on what I have seen to date) explores different aspects of women's lives tied together by the character of Grandma. It's an interesting concept and the cast…

Bad Romance [花为眉] (2011)

An exploration of love in all its forms in Beijing, this is one of those films which was presumably made in the knowledge that it would never be commercially released in China. The film examines the love lives of various young people in Beijing. Single mother Xiaoya [Nranus Chen] wants to make up for the…

Laughing to Die [喜丧] (2015)

An excellent small independent film about filial pety (or its absence) in current day China. Set in rural Zaozhuang, in the south of Shandong Province, 86-year-old Lin Guoshi [Yu Fengyun] is still living at home alone. But when she suffers a number of falls, her family decide it is time for her to move to the…

The Long Season [漫长的季节] (2023)

The latest and exceptional crime drama, this time from Tencent though the creative team have worked on previous iQiyi Light On series. It currently gets a phenomenal 9.4 on Douban (from almost 500,000 votes) having just finished airing in China. It runs to 12 episodes of about 60 minutes each (one much shorter, one as…

My Memories of Old Beijing [城南旧事] (1983)

Excellent film based on a book by Taiwanese author Lin Haiyin (drawing on her own memories of life in Beijing) and directed by Wu Yigong [Evening Rain]. One might expect a rose tinted picture of Beijing from the title and some of the publicity (below) but this is anything but. It is the 1920s and…

Bitter Flowers [下海] (2017)

Almost two decades after Durian, Durian we have another film about a Chinese woman from the north-east going abroad to earn money and ending up as a sex worker. Lina [Qi Xi, So Long, My Son] lives with her husband [the prolific Geng Le, Blue Amber amongst many] and son and has been laid off.…

Durian Durian [榴槤飄飄] (2000)

An excellent film by that most erratic of directors Fruit Chan. Although technically a Hong Kong film, the main characters are mainlanders living (temporarily) in Hong Kong and the film is set roughly 50:50 in HK and the mainland with much of the dialogue in Mandarin. The film is in two parts. In the first,…