Tag Archives: Mandarin

Set in Fenyang, Shanxi Province, the film focuses on a group of amateur theatre troupe performers whose fate mirrors that of the general population in China as massive socio-economic changes sweep across the mainland. The film commences in 1979 with the troupe performing numbers idolizing Mao Zedong, ending in the ’80s when the shows reflect the strong Western influences pervading China, covering a decade in which China saw tremendous changes.
Read More »

In China, homosexuality isn’t illegal, but homosexuals are routinely persecuted by police and arrested for “hooliganism”. The film focuses on a young gay writer A-Lan who, being attracted to a young policeman, manages to have himself interrogated for a whole night. His life-story which he tells during the interrogation reflects the general repression of the Chinese society. The policeman’s attitude shifts from the initial revulsion to fascination and, finally, to attraction.
Read More »

Four short films from four different directors, spanning from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Read More »

A gay New Yorker stages a marriage of convenience with a young woman to satisfy his traditional Taiwanese family, but the wedding becomes a major inconvenience when his parents fly in for the ceremony…
Read More »

China’s enfant terrible Lou Ye returns after a five-year government ban on filmmaking with Mystery (2012), a rain-soaked melodrama set against the disconsolate mist of Wuhan’s impetuously erected industrial landscape. Opening with an explosive car crash, Ye’s latest is a tangled wreck of moral impasses and social inspection. Slicing through a sheet of unrelenting rainfall, two modified sports cars – driven by a group of insufferably affluent kids – race through the streets of the Hubei province capital. Their recklessness is dramatically halted, however, when they fail to notice a young woman who has wandered into the road.
Read More »

Produced by the Japanese Shochiku Company, this Taiwanese drama follows the lives of two generations of Taipei residents. Kao is a gangster, while divorcee/single mother/bar hostess Ying is his girl friend. Kao’s closest friend is rock singer Flathead and his slightly ditzy girl friend Pretzel. The troubles begin when Kao and his long-time cohort Hsi and the others set up a temporary gambling den in the highlands. As the day progresses, Pretzel gets so deeply into debt that she attempts suicide. Later Kao and His get some bad news about a shady business venture in Shanghai. To make some quick money, His and Kao devise a new scam to get the government to condemn so land so the two can quickly buy up all the pigs upon it and then sell them to their fellow gangsters, to the government and to the local farmers. The plan works until Flathead decides to flex his muscles and get some of his relatives, who live in the are, to pay their debts.
Read More »

Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film, this singular masterpiece of Taiwanese cinema, directed by Edward Yang, finally comes to home video in the United States. Set in the early sixties in Taiwan, A Brighter Summer Day is based on the true story of a crime that rocked the nation. A film of both sprawling scope and tender intimacy, this novelistic, patiently observed epic centers on the gradual, inexorable fall of a young teenager (Chen Chang, in his first role) from innocence to juvenile delinquency, and is set against a simmering backdrop of restless youth, rock and roll, and political turmoil.
Read More »

This lurid, ultra-stylish expose on the 1970’s Hong Kong modeling circuit, is something to behold.
Read More »

A sleazy PR Man (Cho) shows dumb mainland businessman (Ong) a fun time in HK. Cho finds him three lovely hostesses (Rena, Wing Chi and Git) and they go on an island tour, where they are stranded. But they have…
Read More »

Taipei, 2010. Radio show hostess Vicky (Peggy Tseng), who likes going round the city photographing buildings, is looking for her boyfriend Dog (Lee Ta-chi), who disappeared on 1 Jan, leaving behind some photos. While searching ons his chatroom website missing.com/ing, she comes across many of his other friends, all of whom attend Datung High School. She meets one of them, Cola (Chiu Sheng-yi), who has fallen for punky drummer Cheesebaby, aka Money (Lin Chen-shi), and has an angry-at-the-world boyfriend, Assassin (Lin Po-sheng). She also discovers someone called Cat is looking for Dog. Vicky tracks down Playing (Nikki Hsieh), who plays dangerous games with men she sleeps with and has been connected with many who recently disappeared. Meanwhile, Cheesebaby takes Cola to meet her grandmother, who has an ancient computer that can still read a floppy disk that Dog left behind. On it are random philophical thoughts that Cola transcribes and gives to Vicky. Assassin, who’s angry at the time Cheesebaby is spending with Cola, and is also falling apart metally and physically, then takes up with the dangerous Playing.
Read More »