The Road Home

On Thursday I was lucky enough to catch one of the regular series of free matinee screenings at the BFI. An added bonus was that it was a Chinese film by my favourite director. I think films are excellent for language learning and cultural information.

I first discovered Chinese films when I taught English in Singapore,which at the time (1990-93) had the highest per capita cinema attendance in the world,apart from India. This was despite very heavy censorship which,made plots hard to follow at times.

When there was a big drive by the UK government in the late eighties to put media education into the national curriculum, I was able to get funding for a part-time Media MA. My dissertation subject was Chinese director Zhang Yimou, best known nowadays for directing blockbusters like The House of Flying Daggers (2004)He was chosen to design the opening ceremnony for the Beijing Olympics.

Earlier, his films were regularly banned in China for criticising the government, whether disguised as set-in-the-past tales like Raise the Red Lantern(1991) or overtly in films like To Live (1994) about the pressures on a family living through the Cultural Revolution. A mastery of location shooting, ironic humour, colour, precise framing and use of local characters as actors (as well as the beautiful and talented Gong Li) made him China's foremost director.

It is these smaller-budget films, often about women struggling against oppression, that in my opinion are his most successful films.

The Road Home (1990) is a love story on a domestic scale, almost totally lacking the subversive elements that landed the the director in trouble in the past. A young man returns to his native village on the death of his father and narrates in flashback the story of his parents' courtship. His elderly mother insists on a traditional funeral procession, one of the meanings of the film's title. Open to a variety of interpretations, as are all Zhang's works, the film combines great visual impact through the changing seasons in remote rural China with an interest in day-to-day routines of ordinary Chinese people.

I hope you have the opportunity to see this and other eamples of Zhang Yimou's small-scale dramas, which are sometimes screened on TV.

The Road Home: www.imdb.com/title/tt023560/