Zhao Dan

A taut wartime thriller, Red Crag: Life in Eternal Flame anticipates the paranoia and violence of the imminent Cultural Revolution while harking back to the aesthetic splendour of the Golden Age Shanghai cinema of the late 1940s. (This opulence is largely due to the work of cinematographer Zhu Jinming, the master visual stylist of Shangrao Concentration Camp and other key "Seventeen Years" films.) The film concerns a hard-boiled woman working in the Chongqing Communist underground during World War II, whose commitment to the guerrilla cause is only intensified after she witnesses her husband's head mounted on the city walls by the Nationalist forces.

Shot in gorgeous color, this fascinating communist flipside to fifties Hollywood music biopics chronicles the life and tragic early death of Nie Er, the composer of the PRC’s national anthem.

China 1839. Because the British imports of opium into Southern China are creating such widespread medical and economic problems, the weak Manchu emperor Tao Kuang is forced to take action that precipitates the 'Opium War'.

The sailors on a Kuomintang warship revolt, arrest their officers and defect to the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

No plot available for this movie.

This biography film is based on the life of the real historical figure Li Shizhen.The story focuses on the social injustices suffered by Li as well as the difficulties he overcame in writing the famous Encyclopedia of Herbs.

A professor of East China University and his family become supporters of the Communists after America supports the Nationalists.

The life-story of Wu Xun, a beggar in the Qing dynasty who set up free schools for poor children.

An absorbing example of genre filmmaking in the People’s Republic of China, Husband and Wife could at first glance be mistaken for any other romantic melodrama chronicling the rise and decline of a married couple’s love; here, though, that love takes place in (and is entirely defined by) a realm of political upheaval and Maoist ideology. A Shanghai intellectual marries an illiterate peasant woman–turned–collectivist hero, with outcomes both universal (differences emerge) and specific (revolutionary self-critiques). At first a popular hit, the film (and Zheng himself) was soon critically attacked for counterrevolutionary, pro-bourgeois thought. Zheng even penned a confessional autocritique, but the damage to his career was done. (BAMPFA)

A story of a corrupt party official who attempts to sell an apartment building he has appropriated from the original owner and the struggles of the tenants to prevent themselves being thrown onto the street.