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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 Zhongliang's newfound life of luxury in a town not too far away. The plight of Zhongliang's mother, his wife, Sufan and her son, Kongeson is contrasted with Zhongliang's rise in a flourishing company.
A critical hit during one of China’s most politically charged periods, Zheng’s follow-up to his 1959 anniversary epics merged Soviet-style socialist realism with his own breakthroughs in film technique, specifically his use of continuous camera movement in the spirit of traditional Chinese scrolls. Tractor-kino at its finest, the film revolves around two rural lovers—one struck with a deadly disease—and their eventual survival thanks to socialist medical advances.
A story of a corrupt party official who attempts to sell an apartment building he has appropriated from the original owner and the struggles of the tenants to prevent themselves being thrown onto the street.
In the mid-19th century, at the height of the Opium War, the Chinese people rose up against the feudal system and the Manchu dynasty, which had capitulated to foreign invaders. ... With their heads bowed, peasants in chains trudge along, those who refused to give money to crush their rebellious brothers. Suddenly, their path is blocked. It is Song Jing-shi who has come to their rescue with his detachment. The freed peasants joined Song Jing-shi. This is how the core of the Black Flag Army was formed. The first historical film made in socialist China in the 1950s. The script is based on authentic material collected in villages in Shandong Province. Legends about the cruelty of Sen Gelinzin and the bravery of Sun Jing-shi, who is called the "Chinese Spartacus," still live on among the people.
A propaganda documentary on Hangzhou before and after the liberation.
An absorbing example of genre filmmaking in the People’s Republic of China, Husband and Wife could at first glance be mistaken for any other romantic melodrama chronicling the rise and decline of a married couple’s love; here, though, that love takes place in (and is entirely defined by) a realm of political upheaval and Maoist ideology. A Shanghai intellectual marries an illiterate peasant woman–turned–collectivist hero, with outcomes both universal (differences emerge) and specific (revolutionary self-critiques). At first a popular hit, the film (and Zheng himself) was soon critically attacked for counterrevolutionary, pro-bourgeois thought. Zheng even penned a confessional autocritique, but the damage to his career was done. (BAMPFA)
Shot in gorgeous color, this fascinating communist flipside to fifties Hollywood music biopics chronicles the life and tragic early death of Nie Er, the composer of the PRC’s national anthem.
Wang, a bankrupt farmer joins his cousin, Wu, in Shanghai, but finds that he is poor too. One day, Wu stops a woman - Zhang, a drug runner - from being run down by a car, and is hospitalized. During his recovery, Wu slims down due to the amount of drugs he is prescribed, which inspires him to create and sell a weight loss medicine.
In old Shanghai, two sisters, a prostitute and a singer, try to escape from the local scoundrels with the help of a trumpet player and a newspaper seller.