Films with: Liu, Ye

Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress /

Set in the early 1970s during the later stages of China's Cultural Revolution, two city-bred teenage best friends are sent to a backward mountainous region for Maoist re-education.

DVD 4067

Dark matter

Elite local patron Joanna Silver welcomes Chinese student Liu Xing to Valley State University. He enters the university with dreams of fame and a Nobel Prize. Cultural differences and school politics threaten his ambitions and result in unimaginable violence.

DVD 6536

Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia Curse of the golden flower /

China, Later Tang Dynasty, 10th Century. On the eve of the Chong Yang Festival, golden flowers fill the Imperial Palace. The Emperor returns unexpectedly with his second son, Prince Jai. His pretext is to celebrate the holiday with his family, but given the chilled relations between the Emperor and the ailing Empress, this seems disingenuous. For many years, the Empress and Crown Prince Wan, her stepson, have had an illicit liaison. Feeling trapped, Prince Wan dreams of escaping the palace with his secret love Chan, the Imperial Doctor's daughter. Meanwhile, faithful son Prince Jai, grows worried over the Empress's health and her obsession with golden chrysanthemums. The Emperor harbors equally clandestine plans and the Imperial Doctor is the only one privy to his machinations. When the Emperor senses a looming threat, he relocates the doctor's family from the Palace to a remote area. They are attacked by mysterious assassins and Chan and her mother are forced back to the palace. Their return sets off a tumultuous sequence of dark surprises. Amid the glamour and grandeur of the festival, ugly secrets are revealed. As the Imperial Family continues its elaborate charade in a palatial setting, thousands of golden armored warriors charge the palace.

DVD 7992

Na shan na ren na gou Postmen in the mountains /

In southern China, a rural postman shows his son, the new postman, the mail route to small mountain villages.

DVD 4245

Nanjing! Nanjing!

On December 9, 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army laid siege to the Chinese capital of Nanking, beginning a reign of terror that killed as many as 300,000 civilians, an infamous tragedy now referred to as the Rape of Nanking. The first big-budget fiction film by the Chinese to deal with the seminal event in their modern history, City of Life and Death is a visceral, heartbreaking portrait of life during wartime, and an unforgettable masterpiece of contemporary world cinema.

DVD 8492