Chi Huaqiong

Five young girls in a remote mountain village each find themselves forced into unhappy marriages. Together, they find solace in an old legend, that a girl may hang herself before marriage and retain her purity, her soul turning into a white bird and soaring to the heavenly garden, where there is only beauty and peace.

The tense hours on board a stricken passenger aircraft that was on a routine flight from Shanghai to Beijing. Shortly after taking off, the pilot Li Jiatang discovers that the plane's landing gear is unable to be retracted. Unable to continue, but unable to land, he and his flight attendant wife Qiu Xiehua, are forced to circle Shanghai. Meanwhile, on the ground, a troubleshooter Liu Yuan is called to see if he can get the aircraft safely back on the ground.

With no motion-picture rating system in place in China, films must be deemed suitable for all audiences in order to be shown. Officially, the censorship system is designed to promote Confucian morality, political stability and social harmony, which means that features are often removed from reality and didactic in tone. Enter upcoming director Wang Jinsong, whose How Far Tomorrow? is one of the very first Chinese movies to tackle the grim reality of rising recreational drug use head-on. Following in the footsteps of modern classics such as Requiem for a Dream and 21 Grams, the film follows happy wife and mother Yu Lanben, whose life spirals out of control when she stumbles across her town’s seedy underbelly and quickly falls victim to addiction. A blistering critique of China’s public welfare system and the dangerousness of excess, as well as a groundbreaking work of social realism, this is a trailblazing vision from a filmmaker whose star is very much the rise.