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Chinese auteur Lou Ye is on a mission to finish An Unfinished Film, which he is presenting as a Cannes Special Screenings, in a way that he set out to make before the Covid pandemic changed its course. It will exist as a separate film.

He describes the new untitled project as “organic, made in a casual and personal way on a modest budget”. It exists as a separate project to the Cannes title and will contain old and mostly unseen footage from his previous films including Spring Fever, which won best screenplay in Cannes in 2009; Mystery, which premiered in...

Amsterdam- and Beijing-based Fortissimo Films is to pre-sell Chinese crime drama “Family at large,” kicking off at the Cannes Market.

The film had previously been announced with sales handled jointly by Fortissimo and Rediance. Now, Fortissimo alone is representing rights worldwide, ex-China.

Directed by Kang Bo, the film is set in the chilly far north of the country. A man, nicknamed “Reindeer,”, is released from prison and becomes involved in a child-abduction case across Northeast China. The man, a pregnant young woman and a mute boy wade into the dense forests of the frozen North in search of an abducted child. The film exposes a family-run human trafficking organization and portrays the underworld of the Northern border of China.

The cast is headed by the in-demand Hu Ge “(“The Wild Goose Lake,” Wong Kar-wai’s TV series “Blossoms”), “Angels Wear White” star Wen Qi (aka Vicky Chen), Yan Ni and Song Jia.

The latest film from the director of ‘Farewell My Concubine’ will be released in China in late September.

Fortissimo Films has secured international rights to Chinese war epic The Volunteers: To The War by Chen Kaige, the acclaimed director of Farewell My Concubine and The Battle At Lake Changjin.

The Amsterdam and Beijing-based sales company will launch sales on the feature at the Asian Contents and Film Market in Busan next month, following its release in China on September 28. The international sales agreement excludes North America, Australia and New Zealand.

The film, previously known as The Great War, is the...

“Wisdom Tooth”, a directorial debut by the actor Liang Ming (seen in a leading role in Zhao Dayong’s “Shadow Days”), might prove to be the next big festival hit that comes from the ranks of Asian cinema. After bagging the awards on the national stage, from its world premiere at Pingyao (both Jury and Best Director prizes) on to Macao and Chinese Young Generation Film Forum, the film premiered internationally at the Bright Future competition of Rotterdam, and the tour continues.

“Wisdom Tooth” is Screening at Five Flavours Asian Film Festival

Gu Xi, played by Lyu Xingchen (seen in a number of Chinese films last year), is a girl on the brink of adulthood. Her older brother Gu Liang (Wu Xiaoling) is not just the only family member, but basically all she has in life. They both struggle to survive, living in a shack next to a wreck of...

The Chinese filmmaker Mei Feng is best known as the regular screenwriter for Ye Lou’s films, including “Summer Palace” (2006), Cannes title “Spring Fever” (for which Mei won the Best Screenplay award) and, most recently, “The Shadow Play” (2018). His directorial debut “Mr. No Problem” (2016) premiered at Tokyo International Film Festival and toured across the East- and South-East Asia afterwards. Mei’s second directorial effort, “Love Song 1980”, also premiered at Tokyo, while its European premiere took place at the competition of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

“Love Song 1980” could be accurately described as an unofficial prequel to Mei’s debut screenwriting work, “Summer Palace”, dealing with the milieu of the students in Beijing during the times of the great change and paradigm change that occurred in the 80s. While the plot of “Summer Palace” takes place in the year of Tienanmen, “Love Song 1980” is situated at the beginning of the decade,...

Once more with rather less feeling: after “Love in a Fallen City” and “Eighteen Springs,” acclaimed Hong Kong director Ann Hui returns to the work of celebrated 20th century author Eileen Chang with “Love After Love,” a not-at-all-short adaptation of a Chang short story laboring under the English title “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier.” Hui has assembled something of an all-star lineup, with the young leads played by rising actors Sandra Ma and Eddie Peng, the legendary Ryuichi Sakamoto on scoring duties and Dp Christopher Doyle returning to the scene, if not quite the time period, of his greatest Wong Kar-wai collaboration, “In the Mood For Love.” Despite all this promise,

Tracking the very gentle wising-up of a naive, wide-eyed ingenue over the course of a few eventful pre-war years, the film begins as Weilong (Ma), a Shanghainese student come to Hong Kong to finish her education away from her stifling father’s influence,...

CineCina teams with Smart Cinema USA for the first CineCina iFest available to the public from now through August 31. Available for viewing exclusively on mobile devices via The SmartCinema USA app. Highlighted by Oliver Mays’ drama Bitter Flowers, Lou Ye’s The Shadow Play, and a mini retrospective of director Midi Z’s work, the CineCina iFest, is the organization’s latest foray into exploring new exhibition methods following the Covid-19 pandemic’s disruption of audiences attending screening events and viewing films in theaters.

CineCina, which has quickly made a name for itself in New York championing Chinese and world cinema, recently concluded its first Online Film Festival, and has received notice for projecting iconic film scenes set in New York City on buildings in Manhattan to celebrate the gradual reopening of the state. CineCina has steadfastly continued its mission to celebrate film and promote filmmaking in the city during...

“Wisdom Tooth”, a directorial debut by the actor Liang Ming (seen in a leading role in Zhao Dayong’s “Shadow Days”), might prove to be the next big festival hit that comes from the ranks of Asian cinema. After bagging the awards on the national stage, from its world premiere at Pingyao (both Jury and Best Director prizes) on to Macao and Chinese Young Generation Film Forum, the film premiered internationally at the Bright Future competition of Rotterdam, and the tour continues with Göteborg.

Gu Xi, played by Lyu Xingchen (seen in a number of Chinese films last year), is a girl on the brink of adulthood. Her older brother Gu Liang (Wu Xiaoling) is not just the only family member, but basically all she has in life. They both struggle to survive, living in a shack next to a wreck of a bus in a provincial coastal town in Northern China,...

It was the shot Chinese-American director Ren Wen had spent an entire day of his short 15-day shoot preparing for: a long take in which a supposedly sweet old woman brutally kicks the protagonist of the film out of the car, leaving him to die in the freezing night of a future world where the sun has flamed out.

But when Chinese censors handed “Last Sunrise” back to Ren with the single, vague piece of feedback that the film “showed too much of the darkness of humanity,” he realized the shot had to go. “The problem is they’re not specific, so we just had to cut whatever we thought they might find too dark or violent” — about four minutes of material, he says. More experienced Chinese colleagues had counseled him to cut more than he thought necessary. Not removing enough “shows that you have an ‘attitude problem,’ which will...

Cannes has chosen two mainland Chinese titles for its official selection: Diao Yinan’s “Wild Goose Lake,” in competition, and Zu Feng’s “Summer of Changsha,” for Un Certain Regard. Both films appear to have received the necessary official approvals from Chinese authorities to premiere overseas. But their journey to the Cote d’Azur is by no means a certainty.

After two mainland Chinese films were withdrawn at the last minute from the Berlin Film Festival in February, it takes a determined – or brave – selector to program Chinese movies in prominent festival positions. Until the film actually screens, there is an ever-present risk of an embarrassing cancellation.

Veteran producer Shen Yang told Variety that “Wild Goose Lake” has cleared all the formalities in China ahead of its Cannes premiere next month, including receipt of its so-called Dragon Seal from China’s top movie-industry regulator, the National Film Administration. She said...

There’s more to the art of the thriller than exciting cutting and dizzying camerawork, as evidenced in the misguided police actioner The Shadow Play (a.k.a. Cloud in the Wind) directed by art house auteur Lou Ye. The story of a young cop investigating a wealthy family of real estate developers is grotesquely complicated and practically indecipherable, at least for foreigners reading the English subtitles. It certainly looks stylish — not in the clean, we-know-what-we’re-doing fashion of fast-moving Hong Kong shoot-'em-ups, but in an arty way that puts atmosphere above making sense. The Berlin Panorama title, no ...

There’s more to the art of the thriller than exciting cutting and dizzying camerawork, as evidenced in the misguided police actioner The Shadow Play (a.k.a. Cloud in the Wind) directed by art house auteur Lou Ye. The story of a young cop investigating a wealthy family of real estate developers is grotesquely complicated and practically indecipherable, at least for foreigners reading the English subtitles. It certainly looks stylish — not in the clean, we-know-what-we’re-doing fashion of fast-moving Hong Kong shoot-'em-ups, but in an arty way that puts atmosphere above making sense. The Berlin Panorama title, no ...