The Shining Arc

Director Zhang Junzhao's superbly tense revisionist war film (featuring striking cinematography from future Fifth Generation standard bearer Zhang Yimou) is widely considered to be the first work of Mainland Fifth Generation cinema.

In 1948 the corrupt in-law of a newly appointed minister in the Nationalist government in Chongqing travels with the minister from Xinjiang with a collection of loot which attracts robbers.