Mere China

A playboy loves gambling and loses the family's foturne, including his wife. The disaster turns out to be a blessing in disguise. However, China is engulfed in a great revolution, and the reunited family starts a life that is very much a black comedy.

Director: Zhang Yimou. Stars: Ge You, Gong Li. Production Year: 1994.

At the age of the three he is taken away from his mother to assume throne as the sovereign of the vast empire. A revolution topples his dynasty. The burning ambition for imperial glory does not just disappear, and a turbulent life lies ahead of him. Based on the autobiography of the historical figure Pu Yi.

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci. Stars: John Lone, Joan Chen. Production Year: 1987.

Two Peking opera actors win great fame for their play about a king and his concubine. Their art is fabulous as their life is challenging. In the end art and life can no longer be separated.

Director: Chen Kaige. Stars: Leslie Cheung, Fengyi Zhang. Production Year: 1993.

An unruly peasant claims a bride that does not belong to him. The union is untraditional, but it has its own beauty. Life seems to a nice turn for better, but war approaches...

Director: Zhang Yimou. Stars: Gong Li, Jiang Wen. Production Year: 1989.

A young woman has to withdraw from college upon her father's death. She is then married to a rich man - only to find that she is one of the master's four wives.

Director: Zhang Yimou. Stars: Gong Li, Ma Jingwu. Production Year: 1992.

In 1939 a Communist solider comes to a remote village in Northwest China and encounters a 14-year-old girl who carries on a lonely, almost hopeless struggle against her fate.

Director: Chen Kaige. Stars: Xueqi Wang, Bai Xue, Quiang Liu, Tuo Tan. Production Year: 1988.

The story of a widowed chef and his three daughters. The culinary master is losing taste for his own art as his daughters grow apart from him. Understanding results in the renewal of their life together as a family.

Director: Ang Lee. Stars: Lung Sihung, Yang Kueimei. Production Year: 1994.

The teacher of a single-room school in a Northern Chinese hamlet has to be away, and a 13-year-old village girl is called to be the substitute. The instruction to her: Keep all the students, not one less, or she won't get paid

Director: Zhang Yimou. Stars: Minzhi Wei, Huike Zhang, Zhenda Tian, Enman Gao, Zhimei Sun. Production Year: 1999.

Martial arts movie re-invented.

Director: Ang Lee. Stars: Yun-Fat Chow, Michelle Yeoh, Ziyi Zhang. Production Year: 2000.

To help her lover to realize his ambition of conquering and unifying China, a young woman schemes an assassination plot. She, however, finds herself in love with the assassin.

Director: Chen Kaige. Stars: Gong Li, Li Xuejian, Zhang Fengyi. Production Year: 1999.

Martial Arts made funny. Residents in a squalid apartment complex are bullied by some axe-wielding gangsters. To protect the poor and the helpless, retired kung-fu masters, among them the chain-smoking, super-fast landlady, rise to fight off the bad guys.

Director: Stephen Chow. Stars: Stephen Chow, Wah Yuen, Qiu Yuen, Shengyi Huang, Xiaogang Feng. Production Year: 2005.