The best Wang Hongwei’s movies

Four independent stories set in modern China about random acts of violence.

A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.

A young dancer, her security-guard boyfriend and others work at World Park, a bizarre cross-pollination of Las Vegas and Epcot Center where visitors can interact with famous international monuments without ever leaving the Bejing suburbs.

A small town pickpocket whose friends have moved on to higher trades finds himself bitter and unable to adapt.

The movie is set in the remote Chinese province of Fenyang, and spans the turbulent 1980s by following four performers in the state-run Peasant Culture Group. We see the group evolve from workers that are restricted to approved revolutionary classics that praise Chairman Mao, through performance of Western classics, after China adopts an 'open door' policy, and the effects on their lives.

During the Cultural Revolution, two young men are sent to a remote mining village where they fall in love with the local tailor’s beautiful granddaughter and discover a suitcase full of forbidden Western novels.

Three disaffected youths live in Datong in 2001, part of the new "Birth Control" generation. Fed on a steady diet of popular culture, both Western and Chinese, the characters of Unknown Pleasures represent a new breed in the People's Republic of China, one detached from reality through the screen of media and the internet.

Five thought-provoking shorts imagine what Hong Kong will be like ten years from now. In Extras, two genial low-level gangsters are hired to stage an attack, but they’re mere sacrificial lambs in a political conspiracy. Rebels strive to preserve destroyed homes and objects as specimens in the mesmerizing Season of the End. In Dialect, a taxi driver struggles to adjust after Putonghua displaces Cantonese as Hong Kong’s only official language. Following the death of a leading independence activist, an act of self-immolation outside the British consulate triggers questions and protests in the searing yet moving Self-Immolator. In Local Egg, a grocery shop owner worries about his son’s youth guard activities and where to buy eggs after Hong Kong’s last chicken farm closes down.

Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke returns to the shooting locations of his films, along with his actors, friends and close collaborators. Jia recalls the inspiration sources for his movies, such as Platform, Still Life and A Touch of Sin. The film is the memory of a filmmaker and of a country in convulsion, China, which reveals itself little by little.

Mysterious, sublime and elegiac, director Yang Chao’s odyssey blends breathtaking images with fantasy, poetry and history to create a complex magical universe. From the Shanghai metropolis to the snow-capped Tibet mountain, Gao Chun steers his cargo up the Yangtze, a river that has nurtured a centuries-old civilization. He comes across An Lu, a beautiful woman who appears in a different identity at every port recorded by a poetry book. Longing for her company, he realizes she gradually turns younger as he journeys upstream. He starts to wonder whether An Lu is supernatural or he is traveling not only in space but also in time. After passing a pagoda that reverberates Buddha’s voice, a flooded town reappeared elsewhere, the grandiose Three Gorges Dam and many other places where lives have been transformed, he finally arrives at the start of the Yangtze, where he unveils the secret of his past and An Lu.

When a drunk passenger distracts him, cabbie Lao Shi collides with a motorist on a scooter. Amid concern that the young man will die before the ambulance arrives, Shi transports him to the hospital. But when insurance information is not located for the victim, now in a coma, Shi gets stuck with the hospital bills. So begins a sequence of personal hardship, as Shi is pushed to the brink of destitution by a system of bureaucratic indifference. Soon, he's forced to make an unthinkable decision. The outcome will be life or death.

An ancestral city; through its delicious botanical garden and its branched canals, we observe the clues and traces of its ancient culture. Two couples of men and women, former lovers, meet again one year later. The yesterday's breath of youth is still perceptible in their conversations. Is it still possible for us to love? Does youth really have an end? Like the networks linking the old city, what type of ecological existence does their culture require? Written by Venice Film Festival