Doc Fortnight ’25: So Close, So Far

Zhu Zhilang is like a Chinese Willy Loman. He is desperate to be liked and he always believes his next big score is right around the corner. It is easy to understand why his son (and documentary profiler) has run out of patience with his spendthrift ways. However, it is harder to blame him for thinking China’s state-owned industries and public-private partnerships would be good for their debts. Unfortunately, when the Chinese real estate bubble burst, it derailed the massive development that subcontracted his design company and cratered his finances as a result. Zhu Yudi follows his semi-estranged father as he drifts from collecting bad debts to new ill-conceived schemes in So Close, So Far, which screens as part of MoMA’s 2025 Documentary Fortnight.

It had been a few years Zhu had been in contact with his father, but he agreed to join him on his annual debt-collecting trip. Zhu pere’s company contracted to supply and install marble and decorative elements of the ostentatious lobbies of the huge complex’s uncompleted buildings. However, he had yet to be paid a Yuan as the film opens.

Like a true Gen-Z’er, the filmmaker audibly cringes as his father sucks up to the various bosses and decision-makers, hoping someone will authorize a payment. Eventually, the elder Zhu secures a paltry partial-payment, which he gambles away online that very night.

This represents a continuing pattern for Zhu, whose multi-million Yuan debt has also engulfed his very angry wife. Despite it all, the senior Zhu is always receptive when a dubious crony pitches him another sure-fire scheme. Honestly, it is often painful to watch.

Still, from a Western perspective, you would assume the government and its various partnerships ought to be good for their debts. Okay, stop laughing all you Libertarians out there. Regardless, governmental-partners should not be acting like dine-and-dashers running out on their restaurant tabs. Clearly, the public-partnerships involved are byzantine in their complexity, presumably allowing local authorities considerable insulation. Yet, the bottom line is small contractors like Zhu’s dad get stiffed.

Only the River Flows

Nobody tells provincial police detective Ma Zhe to “round up the usual suspects,” at least not in so many words, but that is clearly what his superiors have in mind. Under a regime like the CCP, this strategy offers cops two benefits. They can rid the regime of someone deemed undesirable and it makes work easy for them. Yet, for some reason, Ma Zhe is perversely determined to do things the hard way on this case—and it definitely makes life hard for him in Wei Shujun’s Only the River Flows, which opens this Friday in New York.

When a lonely granny’s body is found in the river, suspicion automatically falls on the mentally disabled man who often accompanied her. Ever so charmingly, the cops and villagers refer to him as the “Madman.” However, the discovery of a teenaged girl’s purse leads Ma Zhe in a different direction. Then again, the murder of her suspiciously older lover refocuses the local task force back on the Madman.

Intuitively, Ma Zhe doubts the Madman’s guilt. The situation also hits uncomfortably close to home. He and his very pregnant wife Bai Jie soon learn their baby has a ten percent chance of having some sort of developmental disability. Naturally, the clinic strenuously recommends an abortion and he agrees. However, she is determined to deliver their son and deeply resents any suggestions to the contrary.

Although Wei’s adaptation of Yu Hua’s novel, co-written with Chunlei Kang, adopts the style and form of film noir, it de-emphasizes suspense and proceduralism. Instead, it is most effective recreating the social and economic realities of post-Tiananmen 1990s China.

Throughout the film, it is unambiguously clear the police leadership have no real interest in justice. They measure success in police league ping-pong championships and checked boxes in bureaucratic reports. They want Ma Zhe to charge the Madman and be done with it, regardless of the truth.

Again, nobody uses the words “One Child Policy,” but they loom over all Ma Zhe’s discussions with his wife. For him, the risk of having a child disabled in any way is too great a risk. On the other hand, Bai Jie refuses give up a coveted boy, knowing they might not be so “fortunate” with another pregnancy.

For the role of Ma Zhe, Zhu Yilong did vintage Robert De Niro one better. First, he gained weight appropriate to a shlubby cop with bad dietary habits and then he lost the flab as the stress of the investigation took its toll on the honest cop. It is an understated, but enormously gritty performance.

ND/NF ’24: Break No. 1 & Break No. 2 (short)

There is only good thing about censors. Since they are crude creatures of their ruling regime, they are mostly dim bulbs and largely out of their depth when it comes to experimental film. Maybe that is why this short film exists. Technically, it is two films that are possibly related, but part two directly references censorship. If you want to gingerly stick your toe into the avant-garde, a good place to start would be Lei Lei’s Break No. 1 & Break No. 2, which screens during New Directors/New Films 2024.

This first “Break,” tells a rather tragic but highly relatable human story, albeit in a somewhat elliptical manner. The narrator’s tale of his lover, who inexplicably committed suicide in hotel room also has extra resonance the filmmaker perhaps never intended. Nevertheless, it is a fact a wave of convenient suicides has swept over Hong Kong, suspiciously targeting supporters of the Umbrella protests.

In this case, the photos the narrator’s lover always carried were also mysteriously missing, which again echoes experiences of Hong Kongers. It all unfolds over a montage of static shots of the lover’s hotel room and close-ups of the retro light fixtures, which was maybe a blessing, because the unsophisticated will quickly tune out.

During the second “Break,” the narrator discusses a visit he made with his lover (not expressively identified as the suicide victim in the first break, but that seems to be a logical assumption) to public video booth that screened serious cinema instead of skin flicks. Unfortunately, the proprietor could never find the John Woo gangster film that wanted to watch.

Return to Dust, The Mysteriously Disappearing Chinese Sleeper Hit

Usually, is great news when an indie release becomes a sleeper hit. However, it got Li Ruijun’s hardscrabble film banned in China. Obviously, it is banned, since it disappeared from theaters and streaming platforms, but there was no formal explanation issued. It is not like you can ask these questions on Chinese social media either. Perhaps the better question is how did Li’s searing portrait of rural Chinese poverty and societal indifference ever get approved in the first place? Life is bleak in Gansu (on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert), as depicted in Return to Dust, which opens today in Brooklyn.

Ma Youtie is a humble man, who is not comfortable with people. It is just as well, considering how contemptuously his surviving younger brother treats him. Much to his surprise, his disinterested family arranges his marriage to the disabled and much abused Cao Guiying, largely so they can both be rid of them. They do not have much choice in the matter, but they develop a supportive and eventually loving relationship together, as they eke out a subsistence dirt-farming living.

Ma and Cao get no support from their families, so they essentially squat in abandoned farm houses. Unfortunately, the provincial government has launched a program to raze such derelict buildings, much like in Detroit. Ma also literally has his blood sucked dry by the local oligarch, with whom he shares a rare blood-type.

To satisfy the censors for the film’s original release, Li tacked on an unconvincing epilogue that bizarrely contradicts all the exploitation Ma and Cao endured and the callous disregard of their community that viewers just spent over two hours watching. This is a withering indictment of contemporary Mainland society, but Li’s pacing is decidedly deliberate. It is easy to imagine CCP censors starting the film and skipping ahead to the end, thereby missing the totality of the couple’s Job-like suffering.

This is not a charming little slice-of-life film, which makes its grassroots breakthrough in China so surprising. It can be a tough go, but it is keenly sensitive to its main characters’ trials and travails. Wu Renlin (Li’s uncle) is an amazingly intuitive and expressive thesp. Technically, he is not a “professional” actor, but this Li’s third film he has appeared in. The dignity and the sorrow he conveys are absolutely devastating. Likewise, Hai Qing (a major star, primarily in TV, but also from films like Sacrifice) will quietly destroy viewers as Cao.

The Enigma of Arrival, on OVID.tv

These teens have no future and they know it. The kind of Chinese films that tell their sort of stories do not have much future either, but nobody wants to admit it. It is harder to see Chinese cinema that accurately represents the extreme economic stratification and open public corruption that is rife throughout the Mainland, but a drop-out like Zhao Xiaolong can see it clearly. Out of his wild social circle, Li Dongdong is one of the few with any ambitions, but she is the one who winds up dead in Song Wen’s The Enigma of Arrival, which premieres Thursday on OVID.tv.

Fang Yuan thinks he is the alpha of his gang of running mates, so Li must be attracted to him. However, she actually carries a torch for the strong, silent Zhao, because she can tell he is the real man of the group. Yet, he just cannot handle romance or much of any kind of close relationship. Nevertheless, her presumed murder will impact him greatly. Even when he meets his old friends years later during their in medea res reunion, Li Dongdong is really the only thing on his mind.

On the surface, Enigma of Arrival (which has nothing to do with de Chirico or Naipaul) is definitely a thriller, but there is a lot of social observation and critique baked into every frame, much like Back to the Wharf. The film wears its Wong Kar-wai influences proudly, not on its sleeve, but up on its lapel. The ne-er do well punks even attend a Days of Being Wild screening, just for the sex scene. (Nowadays, they probably can’t even do that, when out on the hunt for some risqué entertainment in Mainland China.)

The poverty and corruption Song incorporates into the narrative is not even subtext, but the central mystery still unfolds in an intriguing “half-Rashomon”-style. Yet, the truth will be revealed and it will be painfully bitter.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the film’s best performance comes from Gu Xuan as Li. Instead of a cypher everyone projects upon, she is the most human of the lot, so her loss means something. It is a sensitive, vulnerable turn from Gu, whose credits are oddly limited, despite starring as Shirley Yang in two Ghost Blows Out the Lamp movies.

Doc Fortnight ’23: A Long Journey Home

They were never really given a choice in the deal, but the Chinese people were promised prosperity, stability, and happiness, if they gave up a little freedom. That is the “Chinese Dream,” but it isn’t working, at least not for Wenqian Zhang’s family. They are all totally miserable and she has the video that proves it in A Long Journey Home, which screens during MoMA’s 2023 Documentary Fortnight.

Zhang has just moved back home after studying abroad and it is super-awkward. Her mother constantly reminds her filmmaker daughter how much the family spent on her education, when she is not belittling her father. As we glean from Zhang’s conversations with him, he made a play to become a tycoon in the mid-1990s, but failed due to a combination of bad luck, corruption, and/or insufficient insider contacts. Nevertheless, she seems to have the greatest rapport with him out of all her immediate family.

Long Journey Home is just over two hours, but not a lot of earth-shattering events happens, except an awful lot of arguing about money. Technically, it does not address the annual mass-migration of migrant Chinese workers to their countryside homes for Chinese New Year documented in Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home, but the echoes are likely intentional. We definitely get the sense Zhang has traveled from an even greater distance mentally for her somewhat strained homecoming.

The Hidden Blade, Starring “Little” Tony Leung

You know this film must be propaganda, when it is the third installment of the so-called “China Victory Trilogy,” especially when the first two films magically transformed disasters into “victories.” In Chinese Doctors, the doctors of Wuhan bravely battle the spread of Covid-19, whereas in reality, the authorities did their best to cover it up. Then came The Battle of Lake Changsin, rewriting the history of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, in which 120,000 PLA troops surrounded 30,000 UN Forces, who managed to slip through their encirclement to fight another day. At least the Japanese really did lose WWII, but it is highly debatable how much Mao’s Communists contributed to their defeat. Of course, that is not how director-screenwriter Cheng Er tells it in The Hidden Blade, which opens today in New York.

The Japanese think Mr. He is the director of their Shanghai counter-intelligence operation, but he is actually a double agent truly loyal to the Communist Party’s Special Branch. One of his duties is eliminating traitors like Liang, whom he meets with in the prologue. Eventually, the film will catch back up to this scene, as it flashes backwards and forwards. It almost seems like Cheng deliberately fractured his narrative to obscure the film’s didactic implications.

Regardless, it seems only Mr. He’s chief enforcer, Mr. Ye ever starts to wonder about him, even though his behavior is highly suspicious. Mr. He certainly has his Japanese military boss Watanabe fooled. The stakes are certainly high for him, since He’s lover, Ms. Chen is active Communist agent.

Frankly, if it were not for Cheng’s narrative gamesmanship and obfuscations, the story here would be pretty straight forward. Naturally, it still slavishly follows the Party Line. Cheng is much more successful as a visual stylist than a burnisher of national myths, because the film has a strikingly noir look. It makes you think Shanghai during the war couldn’t have been so bad, judging from all the late night cafes that were operating.

The Wandering Earth II

In the hit 2019 film and Liu Cixin’s original source novella, the Earth made like the Moon did in Space: 1999, spinning out of its orbit and into space. However, in the case of the Wandering Earth, this was done deliberately, to save humanity from its dying sun. It took a lot of work to make it happen. In the first movie, Earth escapes the sun, but the prequel shows how we handled the Moon first. Prepare for a whole lot of talk about the Roche Limit in Frant Gwo’s The Wandering Earth II, which just opened today in theaters worldwide.

Chinese astronaut Liu Peiqiang will save (or has saved) the Earthly civilization in The Wandering Earth I. It turns out, he will now do it again, or rather has done it before. The film starts with a well-orchestrated terrorist attack against the space-elevator servicing what was then called “The Moving Mountain Project.” It is a brilliantly realized, extended action sequence, but it is also impossible to miss the Anglo-American appearance of most of the terrorists.

Indeed, it is blatantly obvious much of WEII is intended as an allegory celebrating China’s hardcore “Covid-Zero” approach to crisis management and excoriating the Western preoccupation with individuality. Of course, it never shows Chinese scientists destroying evidence of the looming solar crisis, as was the case with the initial Covid outbreak in Wuhan.

Be that as it actually was, there are pieces of two really good movies in WEII. The aforementioned space-elevator scene is a whizzbang set piece. The film also evolves into an intriguing speculative sf drama exploring the nature of artificial intelligence and sentient consciousness. Andy Lau plays Tu Hengyu, a computer scientist still mourning the death of his young daughter, whose consciousness he has digitally copied, in contradiction of current laws.

Hengyu’s efforts are risky, because he is trying to accomplish what the “Digital Life” movement, the major opponents of “Moving Mountain” project advocate. To do so, he needs the processing power of the HAL9000-like 550W super-computer running the project. This story arc takes several provocative twists and turns. Lau is also terrific as Tu, bringing a desperately needed human dimension (somewhat ironically) to a film that often desperately needs it. (However, it is sad to see the Chinese flag on Mr. Hong Kong’s shoulder, rather than HK’s five petals.)

The problem is these two parts are held together by long stretches of exposition and CCP-China propaganda, often relayed through UN-style speeches and news reports. This style of filmmaking is both boring and insultingly didactic. Frankly, the character of Zhou Jiechi, the wise Chinese ambassador to the UEG (the UN successor organization) is an insult to all the victims of Covid and the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang.

New Gods: Yang Jian, from GKIDS

Like nearly every other Chinese mythical figure, Yang Jian (a.k.a. Erlang Shen) makes an appearance in Journey to the West, but he is more prominent in the classic novel, Creation of the Gods and the fairy tale, Lotus Lantern. Those are the sources director Zhao Ji and screenwriter Muchuan primarily draw from for the second film in their mythical News Gods animated franchise. There is also a lot of weirdness added to Zhao’s New Gods: Yang Jian, a GKIDS release, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Around a millennium and a half ago, the gods were sort of overthrown, but they are still around. Yang Jian is proof, as the offspring of a goddess and a mortal man. That kind interbreeding is frowned upon, but he was still hailed as a hero, until an ugly incident closed his third eye. During the battle, Yang Jian was forced to seal his goddess sister inside a mountain. Rumor has it, his reason for doing so was surprisingly lurid (really, GKID?), but—spoiler alert—such talk is slander.

Nevertheless, Yang Jian was forced to leave his nephew Chenxiang with his master to train. Mourning his sister and his powers, the demigod makes ends meet by working as a bounty hunter with the crew of his steampunky flying airship (we’re guessing this part is new). Most of them look like pirates, but their loyal panting dog sometimes physically transforms into an adoring teenage girl. Again, odd choice.

Things veer more towards Lotus Lantern and Creation of the Gods when Yang Jian is hired to find an outlaw who stole an ancient relic. Of course, his target turns out to be the still youthful Chenxiang, who is determined to use it to free his mother from the mountain. That puts both Yang Jian and his nephew in the middle of a cosmic power struggle that encompasses both the immortal and mortal realms. Or something like that.

Muchuan tells a highly convoluted story that gets even harder to follow with each whirling maelstrom the characters jump into. Not surprisingly, it works best when it is most grounded, following the misadventures of hardboiled, half-godlike bounty hunter, who has to fight using conventional martial arts.

Basically, Yang Jian makes the same mistake as Shang-Chi. They both establish likable heroes and put them through some nice early fight scenes, but their climaxes are empty noise. Probably the greatest martial arts movie finale was the showdown between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon. It had no whirlwinds or cosmic-rays, just two martial arts legends going toe-to-toe. That’s what movies like this should build towards, rather than incomprehensibly swirling magic.

At least Zhao finds a way to incorporate one very cool effect. During the course of the whooshing and swooshing, Yang Jian and Chenxiang get swept up inside a magic scroll, at which point the the animation shifts, replicating the style and color palette of ancient ink-wash painting. It looks amazing, even though the action is a little hard to follow.

Back to the Wharf

It is nice to know a film remotely connected to the reality of life in China can still slip by the China Film Administration (at least it did in late 2020). This noir melodrama is based on true crimes and very real government corruption. The fictional part would be the cops actually enforcing the laws. Regardless, karma remains what it always is in Li Xiaofeng’s Back to the Wharf, which releases today on VOD.

Nobody is a more dedicated plugger in his high school than Song Hao. Yet, his principal gives away the school’s coveted guaranteed university admissions slot to his politically connected friend, Li Tang, perversely justifying it for the good of the “collective.” Call it: “community solidarity with Chinese characteristics.” Enraged, Song rushes out to confront Li’s father, but since the working-class teen was never invited to the Li’s tony home, he barges into the wrong house, killing the enraged occupant in self-defense, during the ensuing scuffle.

Or so he thought. Actually, his city bureaucrat father, Song Jianhui, finished the man off, but he allowed his son to assume the guilt was solely his. For fifteen years, the once-promising Song works as laborer in a distant quarry, fearing his crime will eventually catch up with him. However, when his mother dies, he ventures back home for the funeral. There, he reconnects with his now prosperous father and his old “friend” Li, who witnessed the entire incident fifteen years ago, unbeknownst to the Songs.

Song would prefer to leave again as soon as possible, but his former classmate Pan Xiaoshuang is determined not to let an eligible single man of her “advanced” age leave town with a fight. While she pursues Song, he starts stalking Wan Xiaoning, the orphaned daughter of the man he thinks he killed, but out of guilt, rather than sexual obsession.

Obviously, this is a highly combustible situation. In many ways, Wharf is definitely a noir thriller, but Li Xiaofeng also incorporates a good deal social criticism. Song Hao is a character Clifford Odets could definitely relate to—but he would presumably be quite surprised to find him in a socialist country like the PRC.

The Old Town Girls

Teenaged Shui Qing’s economically-stagnant industrial hometown was already depressed and depressing. Imagine what it was like after the Xi lockdowns. She could hardly stand any of it, including what passes for her family: a disinterested father, an openly hostile step-mother, and her spoiled little half-sister. Despite resenting her biological mother’s abandonment, Shui Qing can’t help be seduced by her big city glamor and worldliness when the long-absconded woman reappears, but their reunion leads to tragedy in Shen Yu’s The Old Town Girls, which releases today on VOD.

We can tell from the in media res opening things will work out badly for Shui Qing and her mother Qu Ting. She left her daughter and workaholic husband to pursue a career as a dancer in the cosmopolitan (by regional standards) Shenzhen. However, she is back, hoping to raise money to pay off the loan sharks she owes. Qu Ting never intended to visit her daughter, but their paths cross when Shui Qing is banished from her home, while her step-mother’s parents visit.

Qu Ting still isn’t exactly the maternal type, but she still worries about her troubles sweeping-up Shui Qing as well, Yet, she sort of enjoys the attention and the ability to mold her affection-starved daughter. Finally, Shui Qing starts to feel better about herself, at least compared to her school friends. Jin Xi so resents her well-to-do but constantly absent parents, she faked her own kidnapping to get back at them. In contrast, Ma Yueyue’s mentally unstable father is so poor, he almost allowed his boss to adopt her. The wealthy couple still lobbying for “temporary” custody, which acerbates his mood swings.

In some ways, the neo-noir elements at the beginning and end of the film might feel at odds with the difficult mother-daughter drama that makes up its meaty center. However, every bit of Old Town Girls is driven by the characters’ desperation, both economic and emotional. Shen pulls no punches depicting the exploitation of contemporary Mainland society. For its Chinese release, she was forced to tack on a “crime does not pay” post-it-note at the end, but there is a glaring lack of criminal or “social” justice in the drama that unfolds on-screen.

First Look ’22: A New Old Play

Qiu Fu specializes in playing the clown in Sichuan Opera. He is definitely a sad clown, having endured hardship and tragedy during the Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, but he trudges on stoically—until now. Having just recently died, Qiu looks back on his life while he makes the trek to the afterlife in Qiu Jiongjiong’s A New Old Play, which screens at MOMI during this year’s First Look.

Much to his surprise, Qiu has just suffered a fatal accident, as the demons sent to escort him to the netherworld explain. Like taxes, there is no getting out of it, so he naturally takes stock of his recently completed life during his journey. He grows even more nostalgic when he starts to meet people from his past on the way. Periodically, Crooky, the troupe’s hunchbacked laborer makes an unsettling sudden appearance, like Torgo in Manos: The Hands of Fate (except this is a good film).

Qiu first found himself in a theater company after he was abandoned by his mother. For years, he yearned for her to at least return for a visit, but to no avail. Eventually, he became one of the players in the New-New Troupe, which was sponsored by Pocky, a well-connected Nationalist officer. Obviously, they all must pivot quickly when the Communists take control of the Mainland. Most of the troupe manages to survive by parroting the right lines. Qiu and his formerly-widowed wife (whom he more or less inherited as a member of the company) even become reasonably popular and prestigious again. Then the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward hits.

New Old Play is epic tale of 20^th Century China that is told in a boldly idiosyncratic style, maximizing Qiu’s DIY budget constraints. It is also a very personal story for Qiu, drawing on his family’s own theatrical history and featuring his father Qiu Zhimin as Pocky, the patron officer. His depiction of the Nationalists is hardly flattering, but the real horrors come under Communism. In fact, there is a scene of Qiu Fu and his wife trying to harvest maggots from “stolen” human excrement that is so shocking, yet so bleakly absurd, it will haunt your days forever.

Suburban Birds, on OVID.tv

They build fast in China. Sometimes that means public works projects come crashing down even faster, like the shoddily constructed schools in Sichuan. A structural surveyor is worried something like that could happen in one of China’s artificially constructed suburban developments. Xia Hao’s boss does not want to hear it, but he remains concerned. Perhaps because he grew up in the suburban neighborhood. Or perhaps he did not. The connection between the two narrative strands is always ambiguous in Qiu Sheng’s Suburban Birds, which premieres Wednesday on OVID.tv.

The ground beneath the local school and a small working-class apartment building has shifted enough to force their closure. It is Xia Hao’s job to determine if the issue is wide-spread or localized to the two buildings. He suspects there is a major subsidence problem due to subway construction, but his boss has already decided everything is fine.

While surveying the school, Xia Hao finds the journal of a young boy, coincidentally of the same name. He and his schoolmates enjoy (or maybe rather enjoyed) playing gun fights, even though they are just starting to realize the romantic possibilities of their platonic girl friends. Yet, one day, when they realize their pal Fatty has been absent many days from school, they set out to visit him, in one of the further housing project behemoths.

Of course, this is the same group of friends that sometimes spies on the surveyors at work and eventually pranks them rather obnoxiously. The thing is, it is hard to tell whether for time-looping self-referentialism or if these are two distinct groups of characters that do indeed inhabit the same time frame and geographic space. As a result, Qiu probably does not pull off what he sets out to do.

Still, it is somewhat interesting to watch his balancing act. The kids’ sequences largely have the bittersweet nostalgic tone of a film like Kore-eda’s I Wish, while the adult surveyors’ scenes share the atmosphere of mystery found in Vivian Qu’s Trap Street (which coincidentally was also about a surveyor). There is also some not-so thinly veiled commentary regarding development and governmental oversight in Mainland China. Perhaps tellingly, Xia Hao’s team is often accompanied by a local Party rep, who never seems overly obsessed with public safety.

Spring Tide, on OVID.tv

China experienced a literal “generation gap” when the best and brightest students of the late 1980’s disappeared or sought asylum abroad following the Tiananmen Square crackdown. Guo Jianbo was a little too young to have participated, but she shares many of the protesters’ reformist sympathies. Her social conscience contributed to the bitter acrimony dividing her from controlling mother, Ji Minglan. Guo’s nine-year-old daughter Guo Wanting is caught in the crossfire between her mother and grandmother in Yang Tian-yi’s Spring Tide, which premieres Monday on OVID.tv.

There is a lot of bad blood between Guo and Ji, but Guo is forced to make the best of things, because her mother still has custody of her daughter, whom she was forced to relinquish years ago. While Guo crusades against corruption as a journalist (often to the chagrin of her ethically-flexible editor), Ji organizes local women to sing patriotic songs for government-sponsored chorale competitions. Even though she lived through chaotic times, but Ji now literally sings the Party’s praises, for the sake of her slightly elevated position in the neighborhood. It goes unstated, but this is surely one of the reasons she is able to maintain custody of Wanting.

Soon, their long-simmering resentments boil over once again. As usual, Ji focuses on Guo’s greatest vulnerabilities, by trying to turn Wanting against her own mother. Fortunately, the little girl seems to have a pretty clear handle on the cold war raging around her, but it is still a terrible position to put her in.

Spring Tide is the second film of Yang’s envisioned thematic trilogy addressing the challenges for modern women in contemporary China, but it is getting harder and harder to tell this kind of story under Xi’s CCP. Frankly, it is a minor miracle it was released online in China, considering one of the stories Guo investigates recalls some infamous incidents of Party corruption involving school administration. In fact, many viewers have interpreted Guo and Ji as analogs for reformists and regime loyalists. Regardless, the bitterness of their mother-daughter relationship is often brutal to watch.

Monkey King: Reborn—Sun Wukong Animated Again

The Monkey King (a.k.a. Sun Wukong) is sort of like the Chinese Loki. He is a demigod and a trickster, but he can also be a bit of a screw-up. In this film, he calls himself a demon (with a soul), but same difference for us mortals. Whatever you consider him, he messes up big time in Wang Yun Fei’s Monkey King: Reborn, which releases this coming Tuesday on DVD and VOD.

This indeed the Monkey King, who we have seen in numerous Journey to the West, of radically varying quality. This is the reformed Monkey King, who serves as the legendary monk Xuanzang’s disciple, along with Pigsy and Sandy (a.k.a. Bajie). However, he is still a handful. While staying in a Taoist monastery, he rather undiplomatically (but ever so archetypally) steals fruit from the Tree of Life in their garden. When the obnoxious caretakers blame him for their own theft of a special fruit, he goes on a rage bender and inadvertently destroys the tree.

Ever so inconveniently, it turns out the mystical tree was keeping the mega-evil “Father of Demons” buried underneath (much like the Monkey King himself was once imprisoned under a mountain). At least Sun Wukong is determined to clean up his mess, but he will need the help of the embodiment of human qi, whom the Monkey King calls “Fruitie,” because he initially mistook him for a fruit spirit.

Maybe not so weirdly, Fruitie looks a lot like the “radish” creature from Monster Hunt and it is similarly annoying. However, Sun Wukong’s in-your-face swagger is definitely entertaining. The character design of this animated Monkey King is not so very different from that of Tian Xiao Peng’s Monkey King: Hero is Back, but he has more hardnosed attitude this time around.

In fact, this really is not an animated film for young children. Sun Wukong is prone to cussing and his big battle with the Father of Demons gets impressively brutal. On the other hand, adult wuxia fans will appreciate the action.

All About My Sisters: The Legacy of the One Child Policy

The real villllains who made Wang Qiong’s family so miserable are never seen in her debut documentary. That would be the Chinese Communist Party that enacted and harshly enforced the notorious One Child Policy. The policy has been somewhat loosened in recent years, but the trauma it caused Chinese society will take generations to heal. Her family’s pain and guilt are as raw as ever, as Wang intimately documents in All About My Sisters, which opens today in New York.

Wang has two sisters, the elder Wang Li and the younger Zhou Jin. Arguably, the latter is lucky to be alive, but she doesn’t see it that way. Already having two daughters, technically one over the limit, their parents first tried to abort Zhou. When she was born anyway, they then abandoned her to her death, before remorse drove them to reclaim her. Still hoping to eventually have a son, they foisted her off on Wang’s aunt and uncle, whom Zhou assumed were her parents throughout her early childhood.

Incidentally, Wang’s other uncle was the village official primarily tasked with enforcing the One Child policy, through scorched earth techniques. Eventually, Zhou learned the truth of her origins, but she never really considered Wang’s parents to be her parents—and they are all keenly aware of it. Indeed, they immediately fall into their regular pattern of guilt-tripping and disapproving finger-wagging whenever they are together. Often, Wang segues from documenter to documented, as she tries mediate between Zhou and the rest of the family.

All About My Sisters so uncomfortably tragic, it is often nearly unbearable to watch. Yet, it is hard to pass judgment against Wang’s parents for the mistakes they made, because they were caught up in a rotten system, of the CCP’s perverse design. Millions of infant girls were abandoned to their deaths and millions more were aborted for reasons of gender selection. Wang’s parents were some of the few who tried to undo some of the horrors, at least to some extent.

Feng Xiaogang at Asia Society: If You Are the One

It was a 2008 blockbuster that helped herald the rise of Mainland China’s homegrown tent-poles, but being at the top of the domestic box-office was already a familiar place for Feng Xiaogang. After trying his hand at jingoistic spectacle, he returned to the sentimental melodrama that had been his bread and butter (yet his boldest work was still ahead of him). Millions of Chinese movie fans have seen it, but it feels a little dated thirteen years later and not just because of the flip phones. Nevertheless, it is easy to understand why Ge You would be so interested in Shu Qi when they meet on a blind date in Feng’s If You Are the One, which screens online for free this weekend, as part of the Asia Society’s Feng retrospective.

Qin Fen is a middle-aged rogue who never amounted to much, until he sold a gimmicky invention to venture capitalist with more money than sense. Now ready to settle down, he places a personal add, because that sort of thing had not completely gone online yet. He has many blind dates that are uncomfortable in uniquely shticky ways, but his meeting with flight attendant Xiaxiao “Smiley” Liang takes the cake.

First of all, she is obviously way out of his league. She also seems to radiate a sense of sadness. Qin quickly decides they have no future and she agrees, but both reveal much of themselves over the course of their boozy “what the heck” conversation. In fact, IYATO might have been considered a masterpiece if it had ended after his riveting confession, around the half-hour mark.

Instead, fate brings them together again and again after that. Eventually, Liang even pretends she is serious about a relationship and marriage, even though he knows she still pines for her caddish married lover. They share a connection, but if it isn’t love, can it still be enough?

With Xi currently engaged in a weird crackdown on celebrity culture and the Chinese film industry, it is suddenly amusing to watch films from not so long ago to pick out the things that might be troublesome now. We wish no ill on her, but we have to wonder how long Taiwanese thesps like Shu Qi can continue to star in Mainland at the level they did during the pre-Xi Jinping era.

Feng also satirizes China’s go-go deal-making mentality in a way that maybe isn’t so funny in the wake of the Evergrande meltdown. Unfortunately, some of the film’s best parts could now be at risk, including Qin Fen’s great early monologue, which speaks directly about lack of legal and practical equality for women in China. He also has a notable scene with Vivian Hsu, portraying a Taiwanese blind-date, with whom he discusses his gratitude for the assistance Taiwan offered during the Shenzhen earthquake.

Li Yu’s Ever Since We Love

It would be much harder to produce this film in China today than it was in 2015. For one thing, it stars Fan Bingbing, who was the first target of Xi’s crackdown on movie-stars, for having movie-star values. It was directed by Li Yu, who faced state censorship issues early in her career. As a capper, it adapts Feng Tang’s sexually explicit novel (a bestseller in HK). However, fans of Fan and the novel should be pleased by the sexy, tragic melodrama of Li’s Ever Since We Love, which is finally getting an American release this Friday thanks to distributor Cheng Cheng Films’ commitment to her work.

Qiu Shui is like the Hawkeye or Trapper John of his 1990s Beijing medical school. The slacker largely cruises through classes, spending more time writing the knock-off Kung Fu novels that pay his tuition than actually studying. In contrast, his classmate girlfriend Bai Lu is a model of studiousness, but Qiu is incapable of properly committing, because he has yet to recover from being dumped by his hometown girlfriend.

One fateful day, Qiu happens to meet Liu Qing, a mysterious older but strikingly beautiful woman—and suddenly all bets are off. Despite attempts to keep his options open with Bai, it is pretty clear he is obsessed with Liu, who equally clearly already has her own share of shady lovers in the picture.

Li and cinematographer Zeng Jian (who lensed several Lou Ye films) shot ESWL like an art film, but the narrative is a weird blend of randy student antics and weepy soap opera fare, sort of like a throwback to 1980’s films like St. Elmo’s Fire and Cocktail. That also makes it an unexpected guilty pleasure.

Jia Zhangke’s Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue

Imagine where China might be now if Mao hadn’t tortured and killed his best educated citizens during his various mass movements. Instead, the country lost decades of economic and intellectual development. However, those dark years provided artistic fodder for several novelists who lived through them. Jia Zhangke traces the course of Chinese history through the lives and work of four writers associated with his home province of Shanxi in Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, which opens this Friday in New York and LA.

The first writer under discussion happens to be the least interesting, perhaps because Ma Feng is long dead and most of those speaking of him remember him as loyal Communist village leader. Of course, the regime he helped build would eventually launch the infamous Cultural Revolution, which would sweep up Jia Pingwa’s father, a high school educator. His treatment was so unfair, the future novelist was eventually classified as “redeemable” and allowed to pursue an education, yet in subsequent years, he still found himself drawn to rural communities.

Yu Hua would also write about the Cultural Revolution in To Live (Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation would be pulled from distribution by the Party, which subsequently banned him and his star, Gong Li, from making films for two years). However, Yu started publishing under the relative freedom of Deng Xiaoping’s early reform years. In fact, he was surprisingly shrewd in his dealings with his publisher.

Liang Hong is a Gen-Xer who has written fiction, but she is best known for her non-fiction books about her native Liang Village and the migrant workers who still maintain their ties to home. Indeed, her attention to China’s “Great Migration” phenomenon makes her work particularly zeitgeisty.

Zhang Yimou’s Cliff Walkers

It is 1931. Japan has invaded Manchuria to build a series of vocational training schools and “de-radicalization” centers. That’s what they call prison camps in Xinjiang today. However, the Communist Party considered this a bad thing in the ‘30s, so they dispatched a quartet of agents to conduct a special mission against the Japanese occupiers in Zhang Yimou’s Cliff Walkers, which is now playing in New York.

Married couple Zhang and Yu and lovers Chuilang and Lan were trained in the USSR, which cared so much about the war in China, they declared war on Japan three days after the bombing of Nagasaki. Unfortunately, the four must split up into mismatched pairs immediately after parachuting into enemy territory. Zhang and Lan soon discover their underground network has been compromised and try to devise ways to warn Chuilang and Lu.

The objective of their mission is to smuggle out a prominent survivor of the “vocational schools,” so he can expose the horrific human rights abuses to the rest of the world. Their efforts will be sabotaged by betrayals from within, but they have their own highly placed mole as well.

Director Zhang and his design team spared no expenses recreating early 1930s Harbin, so the film looks terrific. Unfortunately, Quan Yongxian’s screenplay does little to establish the main characters, who are frequently heavily bundled-up, which frequently leads to viewer confusion. The most tangible distinction is Zhang and Yu are the ones looking for their abandoned children, who were last seen begging in front of Harbin’s international hotel.

By far the most interesting and compelling performance comes from Yu Hewei, as Zhou, an agent of the Japanese security service, who has his own agenda. Ironically, the next most memorable turn probably comes from Yu Ailel, as Jin, his immature rival.