Love for Life

During the Japanese occupation of China, two prisoners are dumped in a peasant's home in a small town. The owner is bullied into keeping the prisoners until the next New Year, at which time they will be collected. The village leaders convene to interrogate the prisoners. The townspeople then struggle to accommodate the prisoners. One is a bellicose Japanese nationalist, the other a nervous translator. Will the townspeople manage to keep the prisoners until the New Year?

In an epic tale of theater, gender, love and class, two Beijing opera actors navigate political turmoil as their friendship evolves over decades.

Beijing, 1970s. The Cultural Revolution has driven most adults to the provinces leaving 14-year-old Monkey and his pals with free rein over the city. They hang around, get up to no good, and discover that unsolvable mystery known as "girls."

Brings viewers into a small Chinese city and inspires familiarity with the rhythms of everyday existence, with people's dreams, shortcomings and illusions in a way that is universal.

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.

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 road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.

Seven short films - each one focused on the plight of a different child protagonist.

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.

"At he beach" - A hidden masterpiece: one part rural elegy, one part urban romance, forged together in an editing tour de force. Rarely screened in China or outside, this story of a fisherman’s daughter caught between factory work and feudal forced marriage is simply astonishing.

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.

In a grimy provincial industrial city, a talented but unattractive schoolteacher dreams of an operatic career.

Officer Lei tracks down embezzler Chen Ziliang in Mongolia. Although Chen insists he was innocent, Lei must escort him across China to bring him to justice, but it soon becomes apparent that an unknown organization wants Chen killed.

How does a “mental patient” live in a normal world? Wang Zhantuan (Ge You) is a strange man in the world, occasionally crazy and eccentric, but uniquely sane. Zhou Zheng (Wang Junkai), a sensitive and silent teenager who is self-absorbed due to his stutter, but has a silent backbone. The two misfits make a big family headache and farce ...... This movie is adapted from the short story “Immortal Disease” written by Zheng Zhi.

Will Keane, a Manhattan restaurateur, is content with his playboy lifestyle until he meets Charlotte Fielding, a free-spirited young woman. Together the pair pursue a passionate affair that forces them both to reevaluate what they want out of life, even as fate threatens to steal away their future.

Zhao Liang’s film portrays AIDS sufferers of both genders; they are all people with very different biographies. As if it wasn’t bad enough being infected by HIV, their suffering is compounded by the fact that in the People’s Republic of China the disease is hushed up and people living with AIDS are ostracised. In China, the public at large knows very little about the disease and most people associate the virus with promiscuity. This fear of discrimination forces most patients to hide the fact that they are positive. The AIDS sufferers in Zhao Liang’s film were willing to share their experiences with him. The filmmaker was able to make contact with them via internet support groups; he also visited children with Aids at a ‘red ribbon’ school; but above all, he talked to AIDS sufferers during the making of Gu Changwei’s film. It is their presence which lends Changwei’s film its particular authenticity.