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Based on the famous 18th century Chinese novel with the same name. Set during the 1700s in China, a prominent family loses its good luck when one of the sons loses the jade chip that was embedded in his mouth.
Historical film based on the life of Wu Zetian, the only female emperor in Chinese history
The story was liberally adapted from a short sequence in the popular Chinese folk tale Journey to the West. Princess Iron Fan is a main character. Specifically, the film focused on the duel between the Monkey King and a vengeful princess, whose fan is desperately needed to quench the flames that surround a peasant village.
No description available.
Jiang Danping arrives in a city at night, where often a mysterious man causes panic.
Old Shanghai
Sister Ye lives in a rural village, where everyone makes traditional toys. When Sister Ye's husband dies of an unknown illness, and while Ye is attending to him, her son is kidnapped and sold to a wealthy lady in the city of Shanghai. Shortly after, the village is destroyed during an attack between rival warlords, forcing the villagers move to the city, where they continue to make toys. Ten years pass, and Ye's daughter Zhu'er has become a toy designer. While helping the Nationalist army at the rear, Zhu'er is killed in an attack by the Japanese. On New Year's Eve, Sister Ye is dressed in rags, sitting on the curb, selling toys. A young boy buys toys from her, and it is none other than her son, whom she does not recognize.
Blood on Wolf Mountain tells the story of a village that is beset by a pack of wolves. Made just prior to the commencement of full-scale war with the Japanese, the film itself is often considered an allegory of conflict between China and Japan.
Lu Ban's second short titled The Man Who Doesn’t Bother about Trifles (不拘小节的人 bùjū xiǎojié de rén). He carefully toned down the political satire here, switching his target to intellectuals instead of bureaucrats. The main character, Li Shaobai, is a rude literary critic who goes to a conference to lecture about satirical literature. Li is absolutely full of himself, and constantly misunderstands other people. Like Before the New Director Arrives, The Man Who Doesn’t Bother about Trifles was greeted with plenty of positive responses. Still, while Lu tried to be more careful with this second short, this didn’t stop some critics from taking issue with its ridiculous main character and humor.
Young sprinter Lin Ying enrolls in a sports college in Shanghai. As she becomes a sports celebrity, she starts to mangle with the upper class and has gradually forgotten the true essence of sports.
This movie is based on the famous Chinese folklore that is more than one and a half millennium old. The same folklore was what the Disney animation Mulan is based on, and similarly, it was what many Chinese movies/operas/plays based on.
Two famous comedians from pre-Revolution days perform a series of sketches in a theatre for a group of Party cadres. The stage performances blend over into absurdist, self-contained fantasy episodes where the two comics allegorically parody Party propaganda and ideological orthodoxy.
Based on the play The Government Inspector by Nikolay Gogol.
"Lianhua Symphony" - a small collection, consisting of eight short films shot in 1937 by young filmmakers Shanghai Lianhua Film Company. Part 1: Two Yuans (兩毛錢) directed by Situ Huimin / Part 2: Nightmares in Spring Chamber (春閨斷夢) directed by Fei Mu / Part 3: The Stranger (陌生人) directed by Tan Youliu / Part 4: Three Friends (三人行) directed by Shen Fu / Part 5: Landscape Under the Moonlight (月下小景) directed by He Mengfu / Part 6: The Ghost (鬼) directed by Zhu Shilin / Part 7: Rhapsody of a Madman (瘋人狂想曲) directed by Sun Yu / Part 8: Five Little Brothers (小五義) directed by Cai Chusheng
Live action adaptation of Snow White fairy tale.
At a hotel near Cold Mountain, travelers find a book titled Cold Mountain Night Rain in the library. The story goes: One stormy night, two officers escorting a young convict arrive at a house seeking shelter. The master, knowing the prisoner was a dutiful son, welcomes them. Later, a merchant and two travelers also arrive. During the night, a woman visits the convict but, impressed by his virtue, helps him escape. Meanwhile, a woman appears in the merchant’s room, but she vanishes when he calls for help. Later, the travelers rob the merchant, killing an officer, but are killed themselves after trying to assault the women. The convict escapes, and the merchant awakens near an ancient tomb, surrounded by officers and thieves. After finishing the story, a wise man reassures the travelers, saying the author used ghosts and gods to vent frustration with the world.
When cloth merchant Zhao Dexin passed through the ancient tomb, he met the scholar Qin Qiufan and the girl Hua Hongyu in the underworld. Qiufan was killed by robbers on the way to Beijing, and his body was thrown into Hongyu's cemetery. Wang Jinqing, the nephew of Hongyu's stepmother, once forced Hongyu to marry him. Hongyu could not bear the coercion and hanged herself. Later, Wang Jinqing was killed for taking someone else's wife, and he still did not let Hongyu go in the underworld. Qiufan and Hongyu loved each other, but they could not get married in the underworld because there was no evidence of their marriage in the world.
This is one of the rare gems in early Chinese musical films that still exists today. Nancy Chan plays a naïve young woman who can sing and dance. Under the arrangement of her stepfather, she becomes a star and indulges in the glitz and glamour of the entertainment world before getting married to a wealthy heir in Nanyang. Yet her husband is cruel and unfaithful, leading her to divorce and return to her parents in Shanghai. She is set for a comeback to the stage. Her young daughter suffers from a serious illness. A remake of the Bu Wanchang’s silent film The Light of Maternal Instinct (1933), this film takes cues from Hollywood musicals, resulting in an elegant and lively fusion of camera movement and musical numbers. The film also reflects the harsh reality of China in the 1930s and the pathos of popular literature by combining morals, entertainment and social commentary to show that changes in the idea of femininity is a symbol of progress.
