Natacha Devillers

Loosely based on The Tale of Darkness, a traditional song of mourning, the film follows Wang Zhun, a director in search of inspiration for his new script, as he embarks on an unpredictable trek across China’s remote Shennongjia mountains in Hubei province with an urbane producer, Ding Hongmei; a young actor named Bai; and his loyal photographer, Du Chun. The journey delivers a relentless series of unexpected physical hardships and subtle emotional ebbs and flows on the protagonists.

Han Jie’s feature debut draws on his own experiences growing up in a desolate mining district in northern China’s Shanxi province. A Chinese road movie, Walking on the Wild Side charts a young gang’s continuous flights from one kind of trouble to the next. Mirroring the stark and barren landscape, the film relays the grim story of these delinquents’ dreams of liberty and easy money. Played by nonprofessional actors who are real life troublemakers, the film offers a realism that is at once oppressive, cruel, and sympathetic.

Fifteen year old Mustafa has a nickname Schizo. He is hired by his mother’s boyfriend to find fighters for illegal fistfights. His life is changed forever when a young man mortally beaten in one of the fights asks Schizo to deliver his prize money to his girlfriend and young son. Schizo takes the money to the woman as promised and falls in love with her. Now he knows for whom he has to make money, no matter what the cost. In fistfights there are no rules… until blood is spilled!

Aidai the baksy, or witch doctor, lives in the mountains and helps people. She uses mysterious actions to cure the sick and to give infertile couples children. As capitalist forces begin to encroach on tradition, the first casualty is any culture's most fundamental inheritance - land. The healer has to leave her land because the mob thinks the location is suitable for a filling station. A harsh battle between supernatural good and earthly evil ensues.