Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Wang Chao
A woman, He Sizhu, and her lover, Chen Mo, are in a car accident. When she wakes up at the hospital where her husband is a surgeon, she has forgotten everything. Her lover has become a stranger, but he wants her back.
A search in a poor, remote village by a wealthy out-of-towner, a Beijing businessman, for the body of his son who’s died in a river-boat accident, turns by film’s end into bearing witness to a rural China that, while placid on the surface, is in fact roiled by powerful socioeconomic currents from afar. That breathtaking terrain-shifting, accomplished with the gentlest of touch by Wang, seeps through every aspect of „River’s Edge“.
A prostitute from the Northeast, desperate and unable to make ends meet, abandons her baby. An unemployed factory worker decides to take the child for the 200 yuan (about $37 Canadian) a month in child support promised by its mother. His early attempts at child-rearing are somewhat painful to watch, but also charming and amusing. Eventually, he and the mother become friendly and it seems that the child will be raised in a sweetly unorthodox family. However, when the woman's pimp, a local gangster, not only finds out that he may have fathered the child, but also that he is dying of cancer, he decides that he must adopt the baby - and is willing to resort to violence if necessary.
A country schoolteacher reaching retirement comes to Wuhan in search of his only son. His dying wife has requested to see her boy one last time. He is met by his daughter Yanhong who works as an escort in a karaoke bar. Yanhong introduces him to a policeman who sympathizes with his plight and agrees to help him to find his son. The two quickly become friends. Yanhong also presents her father to her boyfriend, the owner of the karaoke, an older man, who drives a luxury car. However when the four of them meet for dinner one night the old policeman recognizes the boyfriend as a man he arrested over ten years ago...
Set against the background of unregulated coalmining in northern China, the protagonist Guansheng must deal with an unquiet conscience when his mentor, Zhongmin, dies in a mine explosion. Zhongmin's ghost returns with a request which motivates Guansheng out of his lethargy but which will try him to the depths of his soul. (Adelaide Film Festival)
From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Kong Xiu, an ordinary female worker, bravely got rid of the shackles of two unfortunate marriages, and grew up to be a writer in her spare time in the heavy workshop work.
Father got leukaemia. Mother was laid off long ago. She had to borrow money for her husband everywhere. Sister went to a night club to be a waitress secretly and soon became a “call girl”. Lin was cold-shouldered at school because of father’s illness. He became disgusted of school. One day, at the riverside, he found a dilapidated ship and knew the strange “father and daughter”. Lin made friends with that girl and helped them to steal iron stone. Because of Lin’s frequent absences the teacher came to see mother. He was sympathy for her. One day, Lin discovered his teacher was at his home with mother together…Lin went to see father. He could not help emerging out such a fantasy: He pinched father’s transfusion tube…Lin came to the riverside once again, but that ship disappeared…
