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A godforsaken region in highland China. The body of a man who has been beaten to death is found on the mountainside. The police station and a hospital would appear to be the only places still functioning in this impassable wilderness strewn with ruined buildings and forlorn-looking streets. This is the home to which Lao Liu is now returning after an absence of many years. He pays a visit to the grave of a friend who died in an accident, shares with his friend’s sister memories of happier times before he left her, and reencounters A Jie, who is mixed up in criminal activities and dreams of being able to see the sea once in his life. Barely anyone stays here. The younger generation has moved to the big cities in search of a better life either through marriage or by securing a factory job. A Jie has other plans and is in need of Lao Liu’s help. But following an encounter with a monk Lao Liu finds himself withdrawing into the spiritual world he once sought to escape. Yang Heng’s masterful, painterly cinematic images are suffused by magical serenity; the screen becomes a hypnotic space through which the remaining inhabitants of this Chinese provincial backwater wander trance-like, trying to forge their own way in life.

A city in southern China and a bag containing a million yuan draws several people from diverse backgrounds with different personal motives into a bloody conflict. Philosophising gangster bosses, ageing hitmen, men and women who are tired of the struggle to survive – anyone who happens to have the bag holds on to it tightly, as if it were a lifeline. Hao ji le is a black comedy; the film’s inscrutable, laconic humour holds up a magnifying glass to attitudes to life and social conditions. Humankind’s constant greed meets a deeply insecure country in transition. The reduced realism of the film’s animated tableau heightens and stylises the mood in today’s China, caught between stasis and a new beginning. The protagonists of this macabre dance wander, strangely lost, through precisely drawn but radically changing cityscapes. The signs and symbols of capitalism impose themselves everywhere, but most people are excluded from the life these signs promise. And Mao Zedong’s image still graces the banknotes.

The first conversation with the friendly caregiver already sends a chill down the spine: “What’s your former profession?” she asks jovially. The newly admitted patient hesitates. “Why former? I still work as a university lecturer.” Director Ma Li spent over a year observing the patients at a mental asylum in northern China. Many of them have been here for years, yet there are no traces of their stay. No pictures adorn the walls, nor are there any personal possessions on the dormitory night tables. The inmates wear the same patterned pyjamas day and night. The heavily desaturated colours lend the film an almost black-and-white quality, underscoring the chilly atmosphere. When someone wears their own jumper here over the institutional clothing, it comes across like an act of resistance. And yet while the seasons change outside, any hope of ever experiencing freedom again wanes. Over five intense hours, Qiu raises the question of how ill-defined the border between sanity and madness actually is. The film provides no answer. But it allows us to experience how quickly exceptional circumstances can become routine.

A Chinese village deep in the countryside: home to ten-year-old Zhu Hongbo, whom everyone calls ‘Stonehead’. He is one of many children whose parents have moved to the big cities as migrant workers. With only their grandparents and a few teachers around, they have to find others to look up to – or become role models themselves. As a county model student, Stonehead receives not just a certificate, but also a brand-new football. Yet his joy at receiving this reward soon makes way for disappointment. With its documentary-like gaze, Zhao Xiang’s debut film tells the moving and astute tale of children left behind in rural China, and how their individual wishes come into conflict with obligations towards the community.