Samsara

Wang Shuangli is Deputy Director of the local Cultural Centre, and hopes to be appointed Director. However Old Ma is brought in from the country and installed as Director. This starts a long train of events with Wang's cronies using the bureaucracy to try to oust the new director. At home, Wang has problems because his father wants Wang to have a son to carry on the family name. However, because of the one-child policy, Wang cannot have any more children unless his young daughter is certified infirm.

The wife of a prominent psychiatrist can't find her marriage certificate one day. This "jiehunzheng" is all important. Without it, the family officially has never existed, including the daughter. The couple go on a wild goose chase through the Chinese bureaucracy, meeting catch-22 all the way....they need a certificate to get a new one, etc. They even journey back to the People's Commune where they met, now the site of modern private enterprises where nobody even recalls the former occupants.

Old-fashioned, middle-aged Yang Hongqi claims that on a rainy night he saved a university coed from the threat of sexual violence on the outer limits of Nanjing city. He soon begs Gu Guoge, a superstar reporter at Nanjing Newspaper, for public kudos in the press. At first Gu ignores the absurd request, but pushed by Yang's desperate and tenacious attitude Gu begins to look at verifying the case. Finally he finds the victim, Ouyang Hua but no witness. Later, it is revealed why Yang strives so desperately to publicize his heroics: extolled as a model of a national laborer, his father has lived with many medals and commendations on the wall of his hometown and wants to hang Yang's commendation on the wall before his death.

Hailed by the Chinese government as one of the ten best films of the 1996-97 season, this irony-laced light drama is based on a novel by Fang Fang, and begins with the brutal slaying and robbery of a dock worker's family. The city assigns one of its best detectives, Yan Gao to find "the Wise One," the crime lord behind the murders. To do this, Yan sets up a series of surveillance sights around the city. When port guard Ye learns that he and his supervisor have been chosen to monitor one of the Wise One's main hideouts, he is delighted. It is the most exciting thing to have happened to him in years. But problems come because he must work nights and is sworn to secrecy. His girlfriend Bai Lin misinterprets his absences and this causes trouble. More trouble comes when her old lover shows up. Matters are made worse when a message for Ye and Tian to stop their surveillance does not get through.

A chronicle of the events that led to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

Emerging from the Chinese film renaissance of the 1990s (Raise the Red Lantern, Farewell My Concubine) this haunting folk tale set in rural China in the 1920s tells the story of a young woman forces to grieve the death of a man she was destined to marry. Combining astonishing visuals with intriguing plot turns, this moving drama is not to be missed. When the spirited Young Mistress (Wang Lan) is kidnapped on the way to her arranged wedding, the groom is killed in an explosion in an attempt to rescue her. The peasant charged with her care, Kui (Chang Shih) manages to free her but the groom's bitter mother forces the Young Mistress to honor her agreement by marrying a wooden statue of her son, and staying chaste. Director Jianxin Huang's fascinating exploration of forbidden love and rigid social hierarchy reveals a culture in turmoil, where tradition is taken to cruel extremes and young lovers may not survive.

A middle-aged couple's comfortable life changes forever when the wife, driving home alone in the rain while slightly intoxicated, runs down a pedestrian and flees in panic. Her guilt over the hit-and-run, compounded by her husband's suspicions of what happened, begins to affect their once loving and happy relationship.

Wu, a veteran police officer in Xian, is demoted to work in a community policing center after he accidentally injures a hostage during a rescue mission. At first the new job appears to be simple and straightforward, but Wu and his family gradually get engulfed in a web of mistrust, jealousy, accusations, and even worse things...

A key Fifth Generation work released during the second phase of Deng Xiaoping's social and economic reforms, this robust social satire delightfully depicts the clash between the rising class of rapid industrial modernizers and old Party cadres with a serious Cultural Revolution hangover. The film chronicles the Kafkaesque predicament of a bumbling factory translator who is suspected of industrial espionage after sending an innocent telegram that is intercepted by a militant snoop. (The "black cannon" of the title refers to the missing chess piece the hapless hero is trying to locate.) Placed under investigation and reassigned to a less sensitive department but never informed of the reason for his demotion, he petitions to get his job back, sparking an increasingly obtuse and hilarious series of Party meetings, set in a boardroom straight out of German Expressionism.