Widow’s Talks

Realistic portraits of Chinese youth embracing western culture

Required to retire from his job as a utility man at a Peking Opera theater, Old Han is at loose ends, wandering the backstreets of Beijing looking for something to correct.

A man returns to his native Beijing after serving in a labor camp, to find that he has no family or prospects or friends. He tries to make a living, but his old underworld contacts drag him back into a life of crime.

In Shanghai in 1937, a journalist meets and falls for a woman who refuses to tell him her name, referring to herself only as "Ghost". She disappears, and his efforts to find her lead the journalist to clear up an old, unsolved murder case.

On a cold night, psychology student Liu Kai took Jing Huan, a paranoid schizophrenia patient, to a mysterious frozen lake she had often dreamed of. The lake reflected an “8” shape, causing Jing Huan’s expression to change, unsettling Liu Kai. During an internship at a psychiatric hospital, Liu Kai’s classmate Xie Ni, who was in a relationship with him, became interested in Jing Huan, a former factory cashier who developed mental illness after embezzling funds. Xie Ni wanted to study Jing Huan’s condition for a thesis and asked Liu Kai to help her, even arranging for Jing Huan to stay at her home.

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.