Tom Vick's Asian Cinema: A Field Guide

Six young men from the city take jobs building roads for the Chinese Army

The story of a poor silk farming family in Zhejiang and their hardships.

A primary school teacher rallies the citizens of a small town to resist the corruption of the local government and unite to build reinforcements against an oncoming flood.

AKA "Street Angel"

Biopic of 1930s Chinese actress Lingyu Ruan.

1930's China. The village of a poor family is taken over by the occupying Japanese army. One son, Zhongliang, leaves his wife and young son to join a medic group for the Chinese Army. The other son, Zhangmin goes into hiding to protect his family. The focus shifts back and forth from the brothers' parents and Zhongliang's wife and son to Zhongli...

A married couple living in a desolate small town in post-WWII China are paid a surprise visit by an old friend of the husband's.

Tian Zhenhua arrives in Shanghai to coach a local women's basketball team. Number 5 on the team, Xiaoje, excels at basketball but is unsure of whether to continue playing. As Tian gets to grips with training Xiaoje and the rest of the team, he reflects on his career as a star basketball player before the revolution.

In pre-revolutionary China, two young girls, Chunhua and Yuehong Xing, rise through the ranks of Chinese opera, but with their artistic success comes a new series of personal and social challenges.

Wu Qionghua, a house maid, is abused by a cruel warlord until she joins a troop of women soldiers.

Director Zhang Junzhao's superbly tense revisionist war film (featuring striking cinematography from future Fifth Generation standard bearer Zhang Yimou) is widely considered to be the first work of Mainland Fifth Generation cinema.

A communist soldier is sent to a remote region of China in order to collect folk songs. Staying with a peasant family (a widower with two small children), he discovers a community whose way of life is completely alien to him, but he gradually wins their trust.

An old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu'er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as "my Grandpa" by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu'er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a ...

Two boys meet at an opera training school in Peking in 1924. Their resulting friendship will span nearly 70 years and endure some of the most troublesome times in China's history.

Tianqing falls in love with Ju Dou, his uncle's wife who is tortured for being childless. However, after they have an affair, they discover that his uncle is impotent and try to conceal the truth.

Army volunteers train for places in China's 1984 National Day parade, where they are expected to be a perfect marching unit.

An unschooled young man, one of the countless victims of Mao's Cultural Revolution, is laboring in the countryside when he is assigned to teach in a nearby school. Gradually, he abandons the Maoist textbook and encourages the barely literate kids to write about their own lives and feelings.

A blind man's master told him that after he has broken 1000 strings on his Banjo, he can open the Banjo to get a script for his eyes. After 60 years he broke the 1000th string.

Set in the decadent 1920s, Temptress Moon tells the very complicated story of a wealthy family living on the outskirts of Shanghai. Their youngest daughter, Ruyi, is brought up as a servant to her opium-addicted father and brother. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law Zhongliang has a successful, if illegal, career seducing and blackmailing married wom...

In pre-unified China, the King of Qin sends his concubine to a rival kingdom to produce an assassin for a political plot, but as the king's cruelty mounts she finds her loyalty faltering.

A violin prodigy and his father travel to Beijing, where the father seeks the means to his son's success while the son struggles to accept the path laid before him.

China in the 1920's. After her father's death, 19 year old Songlian is forced to marry the much older lord of a powerful family. With three wives already, each living in a separate house within the great castle, there is fierce competition for his attention and the privileges that are gained. This competition gets out of hand...

When her husband is kicked in the groin by the village head, Qiu Ju, a peasant woman, despite her pregnancy, travels to a nearby town, and later a big city to deal with its bureaucrats and find justice.

After Fugui and Jiazhen lose their personal fortunes, they raise a family and survive difficult cultural changes during 1940s to 1970s China.

A provincial boy related to a Shanghai crime family is recruited by his uncle into cosmopolitan Shanghai in the 1930s to be a servant to a ganglord's mistress.

A spurned lover seeks a rich man for revenge. A random onlooker -- who witnessed the public assault committed by the rich man against the lover -- seeks for monetary compensation for his smashed computer. The lover's and the onlooker's lives intertwine as two people collaborate. The onlooker's fate faces an unpredictable turn and mirrors the lov...

13-year old Wei Minzhi is the new substitute teacher of a mountain village school. She is told not to lose any of her pupils under any circumstances.

Prompted by the death of his father and the grief of his mother, a man recalls the story of how they met in flashback.

Zhao is an ageing bachelor, who has not been fortunate in love. Believing that he has finally met the female of his dreams, Zhao makes her believe that he is opulent and consents to a lavish wedding.

The impressive and epic martial arts film has ascetics written all over it. From dancing through the air to over saturated colors and grandiose fight scenes this film is not just for the martials art fan.

In 9th century China, a corrupt government wages war against a rebel army called the Flying Daggers. A romantic warrior breaks a beautiful rebel out of prison to help her rejoin her fellows, but things are not what they seem.

Takada, a Japanese fisherman has been estranged from his son for many years, but when the son is diagnosed with terminal cancer his daughter-in-law, Rie, summons him to the hospital. Through a series of obstacles and relationships, he is brought unexpectedly closer to both an understanding of himself and of his son.

During China's Tang dynasty the emperor has taken the princess of a neighboring province as wife. She has borne him two sons and raised his eldest. Now his control over his dominion is complete, including the royal family itself.

A hunter violates the ancient Mongolian hunting code and must pay his penance.

Devout Buddhists, Norbu and Dolma live with their young son Tashi in a clan in Tibet. Norbu is a highwayman. After Norbu is charged with stealing from the temple, he and his family are banished. Impoverished and marginalized, they can do little when their beloved son becomes ill. Tashi dies of a fever. After a second son is born, Norbu focuses h...

The lives of a Beijing family throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as they experience the impact of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution.

In a mansion decimated during World War II, a frustrated, bored housewife, Yuwen, is torn between caring for her ailing husband and her longing for a former sweetheart, a doctor who has come to treat her husband.

This film is a record of the Tea-Horse Road, the caravans of the Nujiang River Valley, and the aboriginal peoples who live there -- Mm. Ding who has a family with 15 members speaking 6 languages, a pastor who was jailed for 15 years for his believing, a 104 years old lady who walks through 3 centuries, a village head whose wife run away, a carav...

The life of Go master Wu Qingyuan from his meteoric rise as a child prodigy to fame and fortune as a revolutionary strategic thinker, as well as the tumultuous conflicts between his homeland of China and his adopted nation of Japan.

A rock musician looks for his girl-friend who left while pregnant, trying to decide whether to keep the baby.

The film documents a day in the life of Tiananmen Square in 1994, a mere five years after the crushing of a student-led democracy movement in 1989.

Story of a real family in Beijing. The father's drinking problem starts it all. The mother struggles to keep the family together till she cannot take it any more.

A-Lan, a young gay writer, being attracted to a young policeman named Xiao Shi, manages to have himself arrested and interrogated for a whole night. Xiao Shi's attitude shifts from revulsion to fascination and, finally, to attraction.

Yu Xiaoqin steals money from her father and blames on her sister Tao Lan, who accidentally kills her sister while attempting to prove her innocence. After 17 years in jail, Tao Lan is escorted by a guard only to find her home long demolished. The two go to the new address of her ageing parents, and the guard becomes witness to the family's diffi...

A young woman who has lost her first love begins a relationship with his best friend, and the two of them attempt to create a baggage-free future.

A mysterious woman frequents tea shops and other places looking for the right man. A cup of green tea will show you the way to find your true love.

A portrait of urban anomie focusing on two bohemian artists who drift through the miasma of old Beijing in the 1980s.

A young performance artist decides to make his own suicide his last work of art. On the longest day of the year, he plans to melt a huge block of ice with his own body heat and die of hypothermia. He calls this protest against the coldness of society "Funeral on Ice." Based on a true story.

Two young farm workers, who like millions of others, leave their village to seek their fortunes in the city. Each chose a vastly different path to make it and become embroiled in misunderstandings, gangster brawls and police raids.

A tragic love story set in contemporary Shanghai. The film stars Zhou Xun in a dual role as two different women and Jia Hongsheng as a man obsessed with finding a woman from his past.