Tag: Mandarin

Cow (斗牛, Guan Hu, 2009)

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“We’ll stay in the mountains and never go back down,”  embattled peasant Niu Er (Huang Bo) insists having safeguarded his Dutch cow through the Sino-Japanese war and onward towards the new China. A satire revolving around the senselessness of war and the endurance of Chinese everyman, Guan Hu’s Cow (斗牛, Dòu Niú) is also testament to the bond between man and beast who somehow manage to survive through the chaos and the carnage all around them.

That said, Niu Er was not originally happy about being forced to take care of the giant black and white cow he christens Jiu after his feisty wife (Yan Ni). He had a cow of his own. A nice little yellow one he thought was perfectly fine. He didn’t really see why his little yellow cow didn’t deserve the fancy grain reserved for Jiu and got into trouble for giving some of it to her. But when the entire village is wiped out by the Japanese with the cow the only other survivor, Niu Er thinks he has a duty to save it because the village was supposed to be keeping it safe for the 8th Army. It turns out it was an anti-fascist cow sent by the Dutch to feed wounded soldiers busy fighting the Japanese and the 8th Army are supposed to be coming back for it after they return from a strategic retreat. 

But Niu Er’s problem is he’s not just in hiding from the Japanese because there’s also fighting going on between the nationalists and communists. Once bandits have killed all the Japanese who invaded Niu Er’s village, refugees soon turn up with their eyes on the cow. Because he’s a nice man, Niu Er shares some of the milk with a starving woman cradling a baby before realising there’s a whole crowd of other displaced people behind her. But as much as Niu Er gives them, they can’t be satisfied, and insist on over milking Jiu until she becomes ill with mastitis before one of them suggests killing and eating her instead. Not only is this quite shortsighted given that it will only feed them immediately whereas Jiu could still go on producing milk indefinitely if only they were a little less greedy, but it speaks to the loss of their humanity in the midst of their desperation. When Niu Er makes it clear he’s not on board with them killing his cow, the doctor leading the refugees pretends to help cure Jiu’s illness but is really trying to corner Niu Er so they can kill him and eat the cow anyway. In any case, they end up paying for their greed and cruelty by falling foul of all the booby traps the Japanese troops left behind.

To that extent, the Japanese aren’t all that bad. One of them, whom Niu Er finds hiding in a tunnel, used to be a dairy farmer and shows Niu Er how to treat Jiu’s illness which is why Niu Er decides to save him and take him with them to their place of salvation in a cave in the mountains. But a nationalist is already hiding there and the pair end up killing each other. The film seems to ram the point home that there was no real difference between these men who had no particular reason to fight when Niu Er ends up burying them together in a makeshift grave. Setting himself apart from all this war and absurdity, he resolves to stay above it by living in the mountains with Jiu and planting new grain up there for them both to live on.

Seven years later when the PLA eventually turn up, they’ve forgotten all about the cow and are keen to tell Niu Er that they don’t take things off peasants so the cow is now lawfully his. The soldier may be a representative of the new Communist and caring China, but it otherwise seems that Niu Er has been become a guardian of the China that existed before the Japanese with the petty goings of his random village in a way idyllic and filled with nostalgia. Yet it had its problems too. The village chief seems to have had a xenophobe streak, restricting milk from those not born in the village like the widow Jiu who became Niu Er’s wife. She is in many ways an envoy of an idealised communist future in her feminist attitudes and feistiness even amid the sexist and traditionalist culture of the village. Nevertheless, Niu Er and Jiu the cow seem to have found a little alcove of serenity up the mountains of the real China free from the chaos below.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Dongji Rescue (东极岛, Guan Hu & Fei Zhenxiang, 2025)

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If someone’s drowning, then you save them no matter what language they speak or where they come from. Such is the simple logic of the Dongji fisherman who risked their lives to rescue British prisoners of war when the boat they were travelling on was torpedoed in the waters near Zhoushan. Inspired by this historical event, Guan Hu and Fei Zhenxiang spin a tale of resistance and righteousness with an unexpected advocation for borderlessness and freedom as the two orphaned pirate brothers at the film’s centre finally find their way back to their home in the sea.

It’s Ah Dang (Wu Lei), the younger of the brothers, who fishes a British soldier out of the water and tries to rescue him, while the older, Ah Bi (Zhu Yilong), refuses and tries to throw the man back. Ah Bi may appear heartless, but considering the risk the presence of the British soldier poses to the islanders perhaps Ah Bi’s callousness is perfectly understandable. Nevertheless, Ah Dang stashes the young man, Thomas Newman, in their cabin and seems fascinated by his blue eyes and a vision of the wider world that he seems to represent. Thomas desperately tries to communicate with Ah Dang but though he knows some Cantonese cannot get through to him that there are men trapped on the sinking boat. Meanwhile, Japanese troops turn up on the nominally occupied island erroneously looking for a blond, blue-eyed man missing from the ship. Convinced the islanders must be harbouring him, they start taking hostages and executing villagers until Thomas finally knocks out Ah Dang so he can give himself up to save them.

Though the island was not in fact occupied in real life, here the villagers are placed under incredibly oppressive rule despite there only being two Japanese soldiers standing guard. The fishermen are no longer allowed out to fish and are, they say, stuck on land like turtles unable to practise their traditional crafts or way of life. Old Wu led the resistance before, but didn’t end well and now even he has been cowed into submission. The rescue is then as much for the islanders as anyone else as an act of resistance to authoritarian oppression in their following their belief that those in peril on the sea must be saved in defiance of the Japanese’s prohibition on sailing. The same is doubly true of Ah Bi’s girlfriend Ah Hua (Ni Ni), Old Wu’s adopted daughter who takes up his place and breaks a taboo about women going to sea to lead the rescue mission. 

She, Ah Bi, and his brother are all technically outsiders on the island who were never fully embraced by the community. The brothers were held at arms’ length because of their possibly pirate origins, while Ah Bi’s dream had been to escape to Shanghai with Ah Hua. Ah Dang is then touched by Thomas’ constant attempts to talk to about “home” though he perhaps doesn’t quite have one while Ah Bi’s “home” more than anything else is simply Ah Dang. Rather than the expected definition of a homeland of the greater China, the brothers’ “home” is later redefined as “the sea” which is to say a place of boundless freedom where national borders don’t exist. 

These elemental origins also give the brothers a mythical quality that adds to the sense of heroism in the rescue as Ah Bi goes after the Japanese and attempts to save the remaining POWs, some of whom can’t swim, marooned in the middle of the sea. The Japanese, meanwhile, are intent on covering the incident up which means everyone must die from the POWs to the residents of Dongji Island, though it isn’t really clear who the islanders would tell anyway considering that they live on a fairly remote island. In any case, the heroism of the Chinese fisherman is directly contrasted with the craven callousness of the Japanese who are still trying to pick off the POWs like fish in a barrel and only stop on realising that there are too many Chinese fisherman and if they were to kill them all it would get out and they’d look very, very bad. Epic in scope and impressively staged with some truly stunning underwater photography, there is a sense of genuine poignancy and human solidarity in standing up to oppression and cruelty no matter how ironic or jingoistic it might otherwise seem as ordinary villagers rise to up to help those from a distant land they don’t even know at the risk of their own lives and livelihoods.

Dongji Rescue opens in UK cinemas 22nd August courtesy of CineAsia.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Invincible Swordsman (笑傲江湖, Luo Yiwei, 2025)

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Adapted from Jin Yong’s wuxia classic The Smiling Proud Warrior, Invincible Swordsman (笑傲江湖,
xiào ào jiānghú) has a hard battle to fight in covering the same ground as 1992’s Swordsman II which featured an iconic performance from Brigitte Lin as the androgynous Invincible Asia. Produced by streaming network IQYI and Tencent, the film has a more epic feel than the studio’s similarly pitched wuxia and was also released in cinemas but is undoubtedly a much more conventional affair let down by an over-reliance on CGI.

To recap, Ren Woxing (Terence Yin Chi-Wai) led the demonic Sun and Moon Sect in despotic fashion slaughtering many of his own followers. Consequently, they flocked behind Invincible East (Zhang Yuqi ) to free them who eventually defeated Woxing and has imprisoned him in the basement of their lair. Meanwhile, drunken but earnest swordsman of the Mount Hua sect Linghu Chong (Tim Huang) has befriended Woxing’s daughter Ren Yinging (Xuan Lu) through their shared love of music and is kicked out of the clan for treason. Nevertheless, he’s taken on as a disciple by the charismatic Feng Qingyang (Sammo Hung Kam-Bo) who continues teaching him martial arts before he’s called back to the world of Jianghu by Yingying who warns him his friends are in danger after teaming up to defeat Invincible East who has now become even more despotic than Woxing in drinking the blood of their victims to stay young.

Even so, breaking Woxing out of containment so he can take out Invincible East seems like a bold plan given there’s no guarantee he’ll actually do that and even less he won’t just go back to his old ways afterwards. Linghu Chong only participates out of loyalty to his men and as a favour to Yingying and is therefore constantly insisting that none of this is anything to do with him because he’s leaving the martial arts world. It’s a fault with the source material, but it’s quite frustrating that all these women are hopelessly in love with the actually quite bland Linghu Chong who has a nasty habit of turning up every time a woman is about to fight someone and heroically standing in front of her. Ironically, that’s how he meets “Invincible East” without realising, or at least the nameless final substitute of Invincible East who has become the public face of the legendary warrior. 

Christened “Little Fish,” by a besotted Linghu Chong who believes her to be a damsel in distress, she is the only female substitute of Invincible East who has undergone self-castration in order to achieve a higher level of martial arts and in the film’s conception thereby feminised. Unlike the ’92 version, however, Little Fish is concretely female and bar a brief flirtation with some of her maids more preoccupied with her lack of individual identity in having no name of her own. Consequently, her love of Linghu Chong becomes an opposing identity though she feels herself forced to take on the persona of Invincible East. Linghu Chong too is fascinated by her mystery which causes him to act in a caddish way towards Yingying who is otherwise positioned as his rightful love interest even if their romance is frustrated by the relationships of their respective clans.

What they’re really fighting is Invinsible East’s corruption of Jianghu which it wants to rule in its entirety. The corruption has already worked its way into the Mount Hua sect as ambitious couturiers vie for power and throw their lot in with the Sun and Moon sect in the hope of advancement. Luo does his best to conjure a sense of the majestic in the elaborate action set pieces, but the over-reliance on wire work and CGI particularly for the swords leaves them feeling inconsequential while there’s barely any actual martial arts content as the fights revolve around the martial arts stances rather than combat. Frequent homages to the ’92 film including the use of its iconic song also serve to highlight the disparity in scope and vision though even if Zhang Yuqi appears to be channelling Brigitte Lin there is genuine poignancy in her tragic love for Linghu Chong which is also the longing for freedom and another identity that is forever denied her. With his belief in Jianghu well and truly destroyed, Linghu Chong finds himself a lonely wanderer and refugee from a martial arts world largely devoid of hope or honour and adrift with seemingly no destination in sight.

Invincible Swordsman is released on Digital 19th August courtesy of Well Go USA.

Trailer (English subtitles)

New Life (我会好好的, Dong Hongjie, 2025)

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A lost young woman begins to find new purpose in life after taking in a stray dog in Dong Hongjie’s tearjerking drama, A New Life (我会好好的, wǒ, huì hǎohǎo de). A tribute to the healing power of a dog’s unconditional love, the film is partly about the grieving process and learning to let go, but also about what it’s like to feel abandoned and hopeless. Having something to look after gives Xiaoman (Zhang Zifeng) a reason to look after herself as well as her heartbroken father who’s turned to drunken rages in the wake of his wife’s death and subsequent loss of his business.

Ironically, Zhao Bujin’s (Wang Jingchun) old wood carving shop has been taken over by a vet, though Bujin can’t seem to let it go and is intent on causing trouble there. Having lost her mother due to an illness, Xiaoman is intent on not taking up her place at university and instead is earning money as a removals driver often helping to clear houses after the death of the owner. It’s during one particular job that she’s confronted by an angry dog who refuses to leave a cardboard box where, a neighbour explains, it stayed with its mother until she died. Ever since then, he’s been unable to get out, much like Xiaoman who also remains trapped within the box of her grief.

Identifying with the dog, she begins to worry about him during a rainstorm and decides to rescue him as a means of rescuing herself. But at the same time, she doesn’t really want to keep him and continues referring to the dog as “doggie” rather than naming him while he imprints on her as a new maternal figure. There’s a half an idea in the back of her mind that there might be money in it if she cleans the dog up a bit and sells him on with the help of the vet, Chuan (Zhang Zixian), who promises to help her find a good home for it. The first couple he suggests appear to be extremely wealthy and keen to adopt, but the film seems to be critiquing the idea that a life of material comfort is better than one spent struggling with family. The wealthy couple clearly have ideas about their ideal dog and how it would fit into their Instagram-worthy life including a name that skews feminine while Xiaoman’s dog is a boy. Predictably, the couple eventually send it back when it fails to bond with them and insists on returning to Xiaoman. 

Then again, Xiaoman and her father don’t necessarily seem to be struggling all that much. Though they don’t have much money, they’ve managed to keep their sizeable home and furniture even they’re economising on food and worrying about how to make ends meet with Bujin unable to find work. Xiaoman attributes this to his drinking, though it seems he actually sustained an injury he never got treatment for which has damaged his ability to carve. In any case, his industry has also changed. Though Xiaoman is led to believe he’s found a well-paying job at a factory producing wooden statues, she later learns that he’s being paid a pittance to do an apprentice’s job doing things like prepping wood. His friend explains that only elite master carvers make money these days because all the lower grade stuff is all mass-produced by machine so there aren’t any jobs for mid-grade craftsmen like Bujin. Bujin keeps on about finding an amazing log he’ll use for his masterpiece, but like so much in his life it seems like an impossible pipe dream.

Meanwhile, Xiaoman tries to keep it together with her only goal being to buy a proper grave for her mother overlooking ocean. Nevertheless, bonding with the dog, whom she later names Xiaoyi as if it were really her brother gives, her new reasons to look after herself and think about her future. Identifying with it closely, she also comes to realise how little people value the lives of cats and dogs and by extension other people too. That’s one reason why she begins holding proper funerals for pets to give them a little dignity in death when some owners just tell the vets to get rid of their remains and don’t even bother to collect the ashes. Adopting a quasi-maternal position in caring for Xiaoyi also helps her process her own mother’s death and begin letting her go so that both she and her father can start to move on. Truly tugging at the heartstrings, Dong’s film is a tribute to the unconditional love of a dog and the healing effects it can have on a life if only someone is willing to offer it the same in return.

Trailer (no subtitles)

Unexpected Courage (我們意外的勇氣, Shawn Yu, 2025)

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Faced with a surprise pregnancy at 45, a workaholic music executive finds herself re-evaluating her life choices in Shawn Yu’s autobiographically inspired maternity drama, Unexpected Courage (我們意外的勇氣, wǒmen yìwài de yǒngqì). A kind of pun, the unexpected baby is later given the name “courage”, the film’s title hints at the resolve needed by the couple to face their new situation from the prospect of parenthood to the cracks already undermining the foundations of their relationship.

Those would partly be economic, but also their contradictory desires for professional fulfilment. The fact is that even before the baby they are already exhausted. Advertising filmmaker Po-en (Simon Hsueh) has been out all night on a shoot and walks in zombie-like just as Le-fu (René Liu), an executive at a record label, is walking out the door to travel to Shanghai with one of her stars so he can participate in a reality TV programme. They already live somewhat parallel lives and are barely connected to the extent that it seems their relationship may have run its course.

They aren’t really alone in that as Po-en discovers on running into another man at the hospital who is undergoing IVF treatment with his wife. The process is hampered by the fact that he works in Mainland China and only returns every three months which obviously makes trying for a baby logistically difficult. His wife accuses him of not really wanting children, while he later seems less than impressed on being told they’re having twins presumably because of the increased expense while his wife coldly tells him not to ask her to reduce the number because she won’t. A later phone call conversation reveals that the couple can’t afford a three-bedroom home in their preferred neighbourhood, while the husband would prefer they all move to Shenzhen which has a lower cost of living but this would necessarily mean the wife uprooting herself, losing her home and community while there would be no one left to look after her parents as they age. 

Le-fu is also considering taking a big promotion to head up the office in Beijing which is what she’s been aiming for throughout her career. It’s not clear if she intended to take Po-en with her, but in any case the discovery of the pregnancy, brought on by the scandal of one of her biggest stars being involved in a sex tape scandal, forces her to reassess her possibilities. Originally, she resolves to sign the contract and is resentful of the entire situation for throwing a spanner in the works, but is also touched by Po-en’s devotion and reluctant to give up what might be her only chance to become a mother even if it comes at the cost of her career. 

For his part, Po-en wants to keep the baby and is excited, if also anxious, about becomgina father. Having undergone a previous operation to remove part of her womb, Le-fu was led to believe she couldn’t have children and this too seems to have presented a fault-line in their relationship that prevented them from fully committing to each other. At 32, Po-en is 12 years younger, and Le-fu assumes he will eventually leave her for a younger woman while he at times seems resentful that she keeps him at arms’ length. 

The windowless hospital room in which Le-fu is confined then becomes a kind of womb from which she herself is reborn as a mother. Po-en’s tying a red ribbon to each of their wrists is both a romantic gesture that echoes the red string of fate connecting fated lovers, but also a kind of umbilical cord that finally helps them cement their relationship. Nevertheless, they also live in a patriarchal and conservative society that forces the question on them more directly as friends and family suddenly start asking if they’re getting married while others seem to disapprove of the fact that they’ve conceived a baby outside of wedlock. Likewise, the implication is that Le-fu must choose between motherhood and her career and the motherhood is the “proper” choice, negating the choice and agency she is otherwise given in the option to terminate the pregnancy. Po-en, meanwhile, wrestles with himself unsure he is up to the responsibility of fatherhood given that he did not have a father himself and therefore has no role model to follow. A grumpy sugar juice seller explains that his child will teach him, which is what children are put here to do as Le-fu has already realised. Expressing an anxiety surrounding the declining birthrate, the film does not shy away from its causes and the knock-on effects of life in a fast-paced, capitalist society but does in the end find a kind of serenity in the courage of both parents and child to embrace this new life with hope and excitement.

Unexpected Courage screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo (山忌 黃衣小飛俠, Tsai Chia-Ying, (2025) [Fantasia 2025]

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There are some things you aren’t meant to see. Or at least, should you come across them, you should think better of it and be quietly on your way minding your own business. But unfortunately, curiosity got the better of the three hikers at the centre of Tsai Chia-Ying’s timeloop horror, Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo (山忌 黃衣小飛俠, shān jì huáng yì xiǎo fēi xiá) and now one of them’s trapped, forever living the same day over again and forced to watch his fiancée die in increasingly bizarre ways knowing he is unable to save her. 

To that extent, Tsai uses the time loop as a metaphor for grief in which the guilt-ridden Chia-ming (Jasper Liu) is psychologically unable to escape the mountain on which his friend, An-wei (Tsao Yu-ning), died. Five years later, he’s in a relationship with An-wei’s old girlfriend Yu-hsin (Angela Yuen)who was also on the mountain that day, but he can’t help feeling haunted by the spectre of An-wei and convinced that Yu-hsin would never have chosen him if An-wei were still alive. He worries that perhaps he didn’t try hard enough to save him knowing that he’d never have a shot at Yu-hsin with An-wei in the picture. He promised he’d get An-wei of the mountain, but in the end he left him there and in a way he’s still there too. 

This trip to the mountains seems to have been for closure. They’re still looking for An-wei’s body, but Chia-ming has a ring in his pocket and a question he’s too afraid to ask. He’s asked Yu-hsin to marry him before and she said no. He thinks it’s because she’s still hung up on An-wei, but in reality he’s the one who can’t let go and his insecurity is killing his current relationship. Repeatedly watching Yu-hsin die is a manifestation of his anxiety that she’ll never really be his, that he can’t keep or protect her, and that the only reason they’re together is because he betrayed An-wei. Yet the looping is also an expression of the way that his grief roots him in time. He literally can’t move forward and is forced to remember every day that his friend is gone. During his journey he eventually meets an older woman in a smilier position who says that she too finds each day repeating as she struggles to process the loss not only of her son who also went missing on the mountain, but of her husband, who was swallowed by his grief and ended up abandoning her in the same way that Chia-ming is unwittingly abandoning Yu-hsin.

But there are also ancient and arcane forces at work. All of this seems to have happened because An-wei broke a taboo and opened the door to the vengeful spirits of those who were killed by nature and claimed by the mountain. The mountain then becomes a place of death into which people disappear and leave those who love them lonely on the other side. The woman’s husband also felt that souls had become trapped here and wanted to free them while searching for his missing son, but as Chia-ming later discovers, though it may be possible to change the reality, it will come at a great cost and at least one sort of loss will have be to accepted before the mountain will release its grip.

Chia-ming makes his decision, but the outcome does rather have the effect of making his present life seem like a dream or thought experiment in which he imagined a future for himself in which his friend was no longer a romantic obstacle and then felt bad about it. He doesn’t really give Yu-hsin much of a say and makes (almost) all her decisions for her, never really knowing if one day she might have tired of An-wei and chosen him instead or if he could have resigned himself to loving her from afar. In the end, the only way he can free himself from this loop is to face the past with emotional honesty and reckon with his feelings along with his guilt and jealousy. The question is how much he really wants to leave the mountain or whether his obsession will eventually trap him there as just another “missing person” swallowed by grief and led astray by despair. 

Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo screened as part of this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

Trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles )

We Girls (向阳·花, Feng Xiaogang, 2025)

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Feng Xiaogang’s films often straddle and awkward line in which it’s not entirely clear whether he’s deliberately being subversive or only unwittingly. The surprising thing about We Girls (向阳·花, Xiàngyáng·huā) is, however, its contradictory attitudes towards the modern China of which one would not otherwise assume the censors would approve. Nevertheless, the true goal appears to be paying tribute to the prison and probation service which is thoughtful and compassionate, geared towards helping these unfortunate young women who’ve made “poor choices” to reform and become responsible members of society. 

But like many films of this nature, the problem is that the society the prison authorities want these women to “reform” into doesn’t exist. The onus is all on the women to change, while no attempts have been made to address the circumstances that led to them being sent to prison which are also the same circumstances they will be returning to. The women don’t appear to receive any additional education or learn any new skills while inside, and when they get out it’s impossible to find a mainstream job that will hire a woman with a criminal record. Consequently, they are forced into short-term, casual labour which is often exploitative while male employers withhold pay to extract sexual favours. 

Aside from praise for the police force, the film is also a celebration of female solidarity and it’s clear that their biggest enemy is entrenched misogyny and the patriarchal society. Yuexing (Zhao Liying) is forced into a marriage with a man who couldn’t work because of a physical disability. As he resented their daughter and gave her no help with childcare, Yuexing felt responsible when the baby experienced hearing loss after contracting meningitis and was determined to save for a cochlear implant. To earn more money, she became a cam girl but was caught and sent to prison for two years for obscenity. Mao Amei (Cheng Xiao), meanwhile, is an 18-year-old deaf-mute orphan exploited by criminal gang who are sort of like her “family” but force her to steal for them. 

Having learned a little sign language for her daughter, Yuxing becomes Mao Amei’s interpreter in prison, but the pair find things on the outside much more difficult than in. Apparently illiterate and unable to speak, Mao Amei cannot rent a place to stay and is caught breaking into an abandoned car. The police take pity and let her go, but also take most of the money she was given on her release. Yuexing, meanwhile, discovers her husband abandoned their daughter who is now in an orphanage but is unable to reclaim her without a stable income and permanent address. She finds a job as a hotel maid, but is falsely accused of thievery by a wealthy businessman on a power trip and subsequently fired for concealing her previous conviction. Realistically, the women have little option but to fall into criminality because there really are no other options. 

Still, they’re supported by a network of female solidarity from sympathetic corrections officer Deng Hong (Chuai Ni), herself a foundling raised by a policeman, to another young girl sent to prison for reselling exotic animals off the internet. Orphanhood is a persistent theme with China’s longtime child trafficking problem ticking away in the background. The gang of thieves is eventually exposed as running a baby farm to make up for the decline in their traditional line of work thanks to digitalisation. Yuexing is faced with an impossible decision when she discovers that a wealthy couple are keen to adopt her daughter and are prepared to buy her a cochlear implant right away, knowing that it would be wrong to deny her this “better life” but also that her child has been taken away from her because of her socio-economic marginalisation and husband’s indifference. 

It’s only thanks to the found family that emerges between the women because of their shared experiences that they are able to find a way through, while small acts of “foolish” kindness are later repaid in kind. To that extent, the resolution falls into the realms of fantasy as the women are saved by a deus ex machina rather than through finding a place for themselves within the contemporary society and “reforming” themselves in the way the prison service insists. In the end, they are only able to free themselves through an act of violence that comes with additional, though bearable, costs and grants them the possibility of making a new life for themselves if one spiritually and geographically still on the margins of the contemporary society.

Trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Deep in the Mountains (如意饭店, Li Yongyi, 2025)

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Such in the confusion in mid-90s China that the chaos has penetrated all the way to a remote village in Li Yongyi’s satirical farce Deep in the Mountains (如意饭店, rúyì fàndiàn). What begins as gritty Sino-noir soon turns into black comedy as the unfairly demoted policeman hero finds himself chasing a serial killer right into a traditional village community that seems to be home to some of the nation’s least astute people who are themselves caught between the old China and the New but also obsessed with their own status and petty vendettas.

The problems begin when middle-aged former detective Yao (Qiao Shan), now working as a vehicle checker after being demoted for chasing a woman he thought was a missing person while in his underpants which frightened her so much she ran into traffic, is knocked out by criminal mastermind Ge Wenyong (Wang Yanhui) and the pair are taken into custody by the current village chief’’s daughter. She hopes that by catching the “thief” before the public security representative she can secure her succession to the role. As such, she’s inclined to believe Ge Wenyong when he says that he caught Yao breaking into his restaurant while as Yao came out in search of his missing friend on his off hours, he doesn’t have anything on him that proves he works in law enforcement. The villagers’ inability to believe him signals their declining faith in the authorities, while Ge Wenyong signals the rise of the new merchant class which is in this case quite literally bludgeoning the workers to death. 

As a vehicle checker, Yao is immediately suspicious when one of the fog light caps he fitted on a now-missing lorry turns up on another one. The increasingly nervous driver tells him there’s an out of the way place where people sell parts from scrapped vehicles on the black market. Amid the economic reforms of the 90s as the nation transitioned away from the planned economy to a market one, many lost their jobs along with, at least as far as the film goes, their moral compass. Infected by greed, they climb over each other in search of material wealth. In some ways repentant lorry driver Yang is symbol of this newly materialistic impulse. His business went bust and he’s racked up massive debts which is why he ended up becoming a long-distance lorry driver. Even if his gift of pretty white shoes for his wife hints at this new consumerist society in their frivolity, the fact that Yang is dying of pancreatic cancer suggest that he too has been poisoned by the corrupting influence of capitalism. Now his only wish is to clear his debts so that his wife and daughter won’t be burdened by them when he’s gone. 

There are a series of family photos that appear in the film besides the one that Yang keeps in his lorry beginning with the wedding photo which is dramatically shattered in the opening sequence. The “missing” woman we’re first introduced to is perhaps of this new China and looking for a more modern “freedom” in fleeing an abusive marriage to a man who tells the police that he didn’t hit her “that hard”. But unfortunately, she ends up running into Ge Wenyong who takes her prisoner and forces her to be a tool in his dark and exploitative criminal enterprise which involves knocking off lorry drivers and stealing their vehicles which are often carrying new consumerist goods such as televisions and video players. Yet, suave and manipulative, he manages to convince the villagers that he is actually an undercover public security agent while Yao is just a thief. 

Meanwhile, they squabble amongst themselves while ironically preparing to accept an award as a “civilised advanced village”. The title cards at the end of the film assure us they were all punished too for “obstructing official duties, picking quarrels and provoking troubles”, though they are perhaps symptomatic of the problems of the old China, which have not exactly gone away, in their petty politicking at the expense of the people they’re supposed to be protecting. Yao, however, is redeemed by solving the case, if not without a few casualties, and is rewarded with reinstatement as a detective. He continues to be plagued by anxiety about the “missing persons” of China’s transitionary period as a representative of an authority almost certainly a little less benevolent than it’s being made out to be if also positioned as the only real force of resistance towards the rise of rampant capitalism and heartless “entrepreneurs” like Ge Wenyong.

Deep in the Mountains screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Organ Child (器子, Chieh Shueh Bin, 2024)

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How far would a father go for his daughter? There’s an ironic duality at the centre of Organ Child (器子, qìzǐ) in that the vengeful man at its centre and the man he is chasing are basically the same and may have made the same choices were the situation reversed. Nevertheless, a terrible and morally indefensible crime has taken place which will lead to many more of the same as bereaved father Qi-mao (Joseph Chang Hsiao-chuan) stealthily tracks down all those who stole his newborn daughter and sold her to an organ trafficking ring. 

The film is keen to paint Qi-mao as a figure of uncompromised fatherhood through his association with a group of orphaned boys. Working as a baseball coach at the orphanage, he becomes a surrogate father to them and provides a familial environment as he and his wife frequently invite the boys for dinner. When his daughter is born, she automatically gets a whole baseball team of overprotective brothers, but that doesn’t stop her being snatched one day when her mother turns her back for an instant to pick up her bottle. The more Qi-mao searches for his daughter, the more he becomes convinced that she was stolen to order and the hospital is somehow involved. After getting too close to the truth, he’s framed for murder and sent to prison for 18 years during which he plans his bloody revenge.

What he uncovers is a vast ring of human trafficking run through the dark web in which rich people can buy poor ones and harvest their organs to save those they love rather than waiting for a good candidate to present themselves. This is apparently what filthy rich businessman Xu did when his newborn daughter needed a heart, so Qi-mao is led to believe his daughter must be dead but is after answers and the location of her body more than to expose the network which appears deeply entrenched among the elite because it so very lucrative. Yet if Qi-mao is going to all this trouble now, perhaps he may have done the same as Xu if the situation were reversed. He appears blasé about putting other people’s children in danger while torturing their parents to get to the truth even if as it turns out he may not have actually intended to harm them. Just like him desperate to save their child, the parents largely give in when they are threatened and promise to tell him everything he wants to know if only he let them go. 

But there is something quite insidious in Xu’s plan given that it may be one thing to buy a living body off a website and never have to think about the person whose life will sacrificed, but quite another to be prepared to kill someone that trusts and loves you. Xu uses his money to employ a poor yet oblivious family while collaborating with a hospital to fake medical records and manipulate his daughter Qiao who thinks the biggest problem in her life is her forbidden romance with the son of one of their servants, again echoing the class divide that makes Xu think he can do what he likes with those he feels to be lesser than himself. The real “family” turns out to be that created by the orphans which is then spread to the younger generation who are eventually freed from their parents’ corruption and the boundaries of class to live in a freer world less bound by capitalistic imperative than simple solidarity. 

But for all that, Qi-mao is orphaned too in realising that even if his daughter were alive and he could still save her, she likely wouldn’t accept the man he’s become. Qi-mao is man of rage and vengeance. He brutally tortures those connected with his daughter’s disappearance and commits acts of heinous violence that render him unable to return to mainstream society despite his position as an idealised father figure to the orphan boys. A subplot about sexual abuse at the orphanage is under explored, but hints at the institutionalised corruption in which the powerless can be exploited by those in power when no one cares enough to stop them. Qi-mao may not really care that much about opposing the system, but certainly does about the boys and his missing daughter as he wades into hell in search of answers but also retribution. 

Organ Child screens 27th July as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Dirty Ho (爛頭何, Lau Kar-leung, 1979)

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A prince in hiding develops a fondness for a bumbling jewel thief in Lau Kar-leung’s anarchic kung fu comedy, Dirty Ho (爛頭何). The English title is apparently intended as a Dirty Harry reference, though the film obviously has nothing at all to do with the Don Siegel procedural, the Chinese meaning something like “rotten head Ho”, and is in effect a homoerotic buddy movie as the various power balances begin to shift between the two men until they come to function in perfect synchronicity almost in fact as one.

The film opens, however, with a dispute over courtesans and a game of one-upmanship between prince in disguise Wang (Gordon Liu) and cocky jewel thief Ho (Wong Yue). The pair promise ever greater sums of riches in return for female company, eventually ending up in a fight interrupted when the police are called about some stolen treasure. However, at the last second, Wang says both the treasure chests are his and that he is a legitimate jewel seller from Beijing. He saves Ho from arrest, but also takes the stolen treasure chest with him, ensuring Ho will later return to take it back.

Why Wang takes a liking to him isn’t really clear, but even in his clumsy martial arts skills he seems to see something that could be polished if only he could turn him into an upright citizen. He does this partly by means of trickery, injuring Ho on the head with a poisoned sword and then promising him the antidote but only if he agrees to become his disciple and do exactly as he says. For the rest of the film, Ho wears a large black plaster on his head that slowly decreases in size as he begins to reform under Wang’s tutelage. But the power dynamic between them later shifts when Wang is injured and has to use a wheelchair with Ho now dependent on him for care and protection. 

What emerges between them is strangely like a marriage while the two of them are later accosted by the “Seven Agonies” led by a very effeminate man who also causes Ho to take on a camp persona until actively rejecting it. No one is really quite as they seem, Wang actually a prince in disguise hiding out from his 13 brothers, and in particular the fourth one, who really want him dead so they can inherit the kingdom. In true martial arts fashion, Wang isn’t interested in the throne, fame, or fortune, but rather than a commitment to resisting oppression simply wants to be free to enjoy the finer things in life like art, antiques, and strong liquor. 

Meanwhile, the two are also attacked by a gang of bandits faking disabilities and Wang at one point tries to pass off one of the concubines as his bodyguard to conceal the extent of his martial arts skills. Reuniting with Gordon Liu after 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Lau’s choreography has a playful, slapstick sensibility such as in the ongoing duel of swapped tankards with one of the assassins. The hand movements are fast and precise, a maze and flurry of moment culminating in the final showdown with Lo Lieh’s enemy general in which the two men are so perfectly in tune that they move almost as one. 

Lau stages an increasingly surreal sequence of events, including the pair sheltering under umbrellas in the middle of a dilapidated town while targeted by assassins hired by Wang’s brother, but ends in curiously ambiguous fashion with the matter of the court unresolved despite Wang’s desire to live freely as he chooses. Of course, a prince he is but Wang is also constrained by his social status in much the same way Ho is prevented from living his authentic life because of the obligations entailed with being a potential heir to the throne. Meanwhile, it seems the king is doddery and has unwittingly created a vacuum which has pit his 14 sons against each other, destabilising the society in the process. Not wanting the job actually makes Wang an ideal candidate though, he’d have to survive all the assassination attempts first. A riot of colour and witty humour, the film boats some of Lau’s most intricate choreography performed by two actors at the top of their game who are perfectly primed to bounce of each other in a humorous back and for between the shifting sands of master and pupil.