Movies: Zhao Dan

China 1839. Because the British imports of opium into Southern China are creating such widespread medical and economic problems, the weak Manchu emperor Tao Kuang is forced to take action that precipitates the 'Opium War'....

In old Shanghai, two sisters, a prostitute and a singer, try to escape from the local scoundrels with the help of a trumpet player and a newspaper seller....

At a Shanghai apartment, Mr Hou, a Nationalist official, gets ready to move to Taiwan upon the imminent defeat of the KMT during the Civil War. Mrs Hou gives an ultimatum to the rest of the tenants to move out on behalf of her husband, who is the "ow...

Four students in Shanghai have recently finished university. All are unemployed. Xu contemplates suicide but his friend Zhao talks him out of it. Zhao lives in a shabby room with just a flimsy wall of planks separating him from the room behind. Miss ...

A taut wartime thriller, Red Crag: Life in Eternal Flame anticipates the paranoia and violence of the imminent Cultural Revolution while harking back to the aesthetic splendour of the Golden Age Shanghai cinema of the late 1940s. (This opulence is la...

After a break-up, a college professor, Xiao, molds his maidservant, Yu, into an independent, modern woman, then marries her. However, their relationship is interrupted by the war - Yu insists on volunteering her help, while Xiao longs for a stable fa...

Twin girls separated at birth are reunited when the one raised in poverty becomes a servant in the household of her sister, now the pampered wife of a warlord general....

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Shot in gorgeous color, this fascinating communist flipside to fifties Hollywood music biopics chronicles the life and tragic early death of Nie Er, the composer of the PRC’s national anthem....

The life-story of Wu Xun, a beggar in the Qing dynasty who set up free schools for poor children....

Wang, a bankrupt farmer joins his cousin, Wu, in Shanghai, but finds that he is poor too. One day, Wu stops a woman - Zhang, a drug runner - from being run down by a car, and is hospitalized. During his recovery, Wu slims down due to the amount of dr...

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A professor of East China University and his family become supporters of the Communists after America supports the Nationalists....

The sailors on a Kuomintang warship revolt, arrest their officers and defect to the Chinese People's Liberation Army....

This biography film is based on the life of the real historical figure Li Shizhen.The story focuses on the social injustices suffered by Li as well as the difficulties he overcame in writing the famous Encyclopedia of Herbs....

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An absorbing example of genre filmmaking in the People’s Republic of China, Husband and Wife could at first glance be mistaken for any other romantic melodrama chronicling the rise and decline of a married couple’s love; here, though, that love takes...

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