ELECTRIC SHADOWS (China, 2004)
Directed by: Xiao Jiang
Starring: Jiang Yi-hong, Xia Yu, Li Haibin

“A lovely, elegant paen to the joy and liberty that film offers…sweet and accomplished and Xiao Jiang is a terrific find.”

- The Hollywood Reporter

One of China’s few female directors, Xiao Jiang, makes her debut with this heart-warming melodrama about movies, the Cultural Revolution, and mothers & daughters. If you’re a sucker for movies about movies, or if your idea of a good time is settling down with one of those gigantic, multi-generational novels, then this movie was made for you. Mao Da-bing (Xia Yu) is a water delivery guy in modern day Beijing, and he scrapes his microscopic salary together so he can escape into the movies as often as possible. One day, he bumps into a young woman in an alley who picks up a brick and slams him over the head with it. At the hospital no one can get her to talk, and Mao is seething with righteous indignation over this random, ridiculous, and extremely painful incident. So he’s surprised to find himself taking her apartment key after she begs him to feed her fish while she’s locked up in the local mental hospital. 

Her apartment turns out to be a veritable shrine to 1930’s actress Zhou Xuan, and in it he discovers the brick-wielding young woman’s diary, which, of course, he immediately reads. At this point the movie flashes back to rural Ningxia province during the Cultural Revolution, telling the story of the mysterious woman, her mother, and how the movies kept them alive during one of the bleakest eras in Chinese history. A complicated mystery (who is this woman? Why’d she hit him with a brick? What happened to her family) this is also a Cinema Paradiso for Chinese film, and it reminds us that no matter how bad things get or how hopeless they may seem, there’s always the movies.