When home entertainment enters the market in 90s Beijing, a former projectionist ropes his young son into starting their own pirate movie company, but easy money comes with its own price tag.
With few other real options, when the young village woman in this story is offered an arranged marriage with a kindly but mildly retarded shopkeeper who lives in a nearby town, she readily accepts. Once she has settled into her new home, she becomes involved with her new husband’s patron, a man involved in some underworld trading activities.
Two Chinese miners, who make money by killing fellow miners and then extorting money from the mine owner to keep quiet about the "accident", happen upon their latest victim. But one of them begins to have second thoughts.
Several members of a Nationalist Chinese Army unit that is trapped between Japanese forces and another Chinese unit take revenge when their unit is almost wiped out.
A story about a rural family in China. The husband stays at home and farms the land, while the wife goes into town to be a prostitute to earn more money.
A poor farmer who loves a woman he is forbidden to associate with becomes a hardened mercenary, and is hired by a local warlord as a professional assassin. Years later, he runs into his old love and begins to question his violent past
Freely adapted from Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the film follows the investigation of a local teacher's murder in a small and desperately poor rural village, the story of the crime gradually pieced together from the fragmented memories of witnesses forced to testify at an inquest. Sharing with her Fifth Generation colleagues Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang a remarkable eye for the barren landscapes of northern China and a fascination with small-town life — especially those enduring superstitions that Communism failed to erase — director Li Shaohong also introduces several formal innovations, particularly in storytelling structure, that remain unprecedented in Chinese cinema.
In a quaint small town, there was a thunderstorm at night and a scorching sun the next day. This strange weather that had not been seen in a century made people doubt whether an earthquake would occur.
