Top 10 Best Movies Made in China
By admin on 2014-12-19

Chinese movies are famous for  Kungfu all over the world. However, it has much more features other than martial arts. If you want to know the real China on screen, the following list of top 10 best movies made in China may help you a lot.

 

Top 1 To Live (1994)

If you're able to watch only one film about China, make it this one. "This is all you need to see to know the history of China in the past 50 years," when the movie was shown to a mixed audience of Chinese and Westerners, it was interesting to see how the Chinese immediately saw how the title tied in with the ending while the rest were less convinced.

 

Top 2 The Last Emperor (1987)

This epic film won nine Oscars and tells the story of the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), Pu Yi. The highlights are the film's use of colors and its music - ironically, the Western music was scored by an Asian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, while the Asian score was by the American David Byrne, of the band Talking Heads.

Bertolucci seems to have worked with a color palette, drawing attention to the scene in which Pu Yi is arrested and is to be banished to Manchuria. He slashes his wrists while at the railway station and as the camera zooms in on the red blood, the flashback moves to the red gates of the palace of his childhood.

Reds, yellows and oranges, all colors of warmth and happiness, dominate the screen for the part of the story that deals with his royal life. The colors shift to green and blue, when his English tutor (Peter O'Toole) arrives on his green cycle, and the emperor himself is seen in blue glasses, to signify the narrative's shift of focus.

 

Top 3 Shower (1999)

This film by Zhang Yang tells the story of a Shenzhen businessman who returns home to Beijing thinking his father - who runs a bathhouse - has died. It turns out, however, to just be a ruse used by his mentally retarded brother to get him home. Given his father's failing health, the central character has to take stock of his family and future.

The director makes good use of cinematic space to show the two separate worlds of the sophisticated Shenzhenite and the more rough-cut father and son and as the movie progresses, uses it to convey how those worlds move closer.

 

Top 4 Blood of Yingzhou District (2006)

This Oscar-winning documentary is about an AIDS orphan and the moving nature of the subject is reinforced by the cinematic techniques. The camera is kept at the boy's eye level and shows, says O'Reilly, the world from his perspective. The boy is also often framed in the doorway, with the camera inside, as though to show him reaching out to the outside world.

 

Top 5 Blind Shaft (2003)

This bleak, almost Hitchcock-style film tells the story of two Chinese coal miners who hit upon the perfect scam: luring an unsuspecting job seeker to the mines, murdering him and extorting money from the boss as compensation for their "relative".

The film's setting is the black landscape of a coal mine and the blue and gray overtones reinforce its dark theme. One interesting detail, is what the duo do with all the bundles of money they collect. A movie sure to stir the conscience.

 

Top 6 Up the Yangtze (2007)

Made by a Canadian-Chinese, Yung Chang, this is a great snapshot of a certain period of history from two different perspectives. The main character is a girl whose house is about to be submerged by the construction of the dam; the other protagonist is a product of the one-child policy, a self-centered man who just wants to get rich. Both get a job on one of the boats that ply the Yangtze.

 

Top 7 Mardi Gras; Made in China (2005)

The film offers a wonderful insight into globalization by following the journey of a bead. It is made by the world's largest producer of beads and other Mardi Gras trinkets at a disciplined factory in Fuzhou and used by revelers in the New Orleans Mardi Gras, where the beads offer a peek at a naked breast.

The film juxtaposes candid comments from the Chinese boss of the bead factory and the American buyer at the other end. It also captures the Chinese workers' reactions when they are shown where the product of their hard work ends up, making for an interesting comment on capitalism and globalization.

 

Top 8 Blind Mountain (2007)

Another searing look at society, this film tells the story of girls who are lured into jobs but are actually sold. The main protagonist, a college graduate, thinks she is going to be working for a pharmacy but is forced to play wife to an illiterate man in a remote mountain region. It is unrelentingly bleak to the very end and the handheld camera gives it a shaky, edgy feel.

 

Top 9 Manufactured Landscapes (2006)

In this documentary, director Jennifer Baichwal follows the work of renowned Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky, known for his large-scale photographs of "manufactured landscapes" - recycling yards, factories, dams - and follows him through China as he details the effects of its massive industrialization. It looks at the centers of this industrial effort and their dumping grounds.

 

Top 10 The Road Home (1999)

Concerning itself with the relationship between the old and the new, and of city and country, "The Road Home" specifically involves a young man living in the city who returns to his beautiful, peaceful but poor birthplace to attend the funeral of his father, the much revered local teacher. The inconsolable mother insists that he receive an old-style funeral, rarely seen since the Revolution, for which dozens of men will be required to accompany the coffin on the way to the place of burial. As the son organises the event, he recounts the burgeoning relationship of his young parents for whose romance the dusty, winding country road proved crucial. Hence its importance to the funeral.