Country: China
Language: Chinese
Year: 2000
Running Time: 140 min
To the average Chinese peasant, foreigners were always ‘devils’ – potentially dangerous outsiders who arrived on Chinese soil with dubious motives and nefarious intent. That was especially true of the Japanese soldiers who invaded China in the 1930s, first annexing Manchuria and then occupying large tracts of the mainland.
Ma Dasan and his neighbours in Rack-Armour Terrace resented giving a percentage of their grain harvest to the Japanese ‘devils’, but otherwise co-existed with them quite peacefully.
Things began to change the night when two prisoners of the anti-Japanese resistance were dumped on Ma Dasan’s doorstep. One was the a Japanese soldier, the other a Chinese translator/collaborator. Ma was told to keep them hidden for a few days. But the days stretched into weeks, and the weeks stretched into months. Unwilling to keep the prisoners any longer and unable to execute them, Ma Dasan came up with the idea of retruning them to the Japanese army in exchange for two carts of grain.
The outcome of his scheme taught him the hard way that ‘devils’ are not necessarily foreign … and that war can turn the best of men into the worst.
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Director
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Jiang Wen
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Producer
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Jiang Wen
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Executive Producer
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Dong Ping
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Executive Producer
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Quangang Zheng
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Associate Producer
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Zhongjun Wang
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Associate Producer
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Weiming Chen
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Production Company
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Asian Union Film & Entertainment Ltd
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Production Company
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China Film Co-production Corporation
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Screenplay
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Fengwei You
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Screenplay
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Jianquan Shi
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Screenplay
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Ping Shu
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Screenplay
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Jiang Wen
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Cinematography
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Min Wang
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Cinematography
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Zhao
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Cinematography
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Xiaoshi
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Production Designer
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Shiyun Tang
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Art Director
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Cai Weidong
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Music
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Cui Jian
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Music
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Xing Liu
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Music
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Haiying Li
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Editor
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Yifan Zhang
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Editor
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Folmer Weisinger
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Sound
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Wu Ling
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Lighting
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Jianmin Ji
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Lighting
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Tianlei Li
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Costume
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Ying Zhang
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Costume
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Wenyan Gao
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Cai Weidong
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Chen Shu
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Cong Zhijun
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Jiang Hongbo
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Jiang Wen
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Li Haibin
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Sawada Kenya
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Teruyuki Kagawa
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Xi Zi
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Yuan Ding
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Grand Jury Prize Competition Cannes, French Culture Award (Jiang Wen) Cannes, Audience Award Barcelona, NETPAC Award Hawaii, Best Foreign Language Film Director & Best Supporting Actor (Teruyuki Kagawa) Kinema Junpo Awards Tokyo, Best Foreign Language Film Mainichi Film Concours Tokyo, Official Selections Film Forum New York, Tribeca New York, Brisbane, Oslo, Gotheborg, Haifa, Hawaii, Istanbul, Ljubljana, Copenhagen, New Zealand, Rio de Janeiro, Rotterdam, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Sarajewo, Seattle, Singapore, Washington, Budapest Titanic, Bruges, Turnhout, UCLA, Frankfurt, Torun, Vienna, Madrid, Princeton, Vladivostok
Born into an army family in Tangshan, Hebei Province, 5 January 1963. He joined his father in Beijing at the age of six and showed an interest in acting from an early age. Until the age of ten, he was known as Jiang Xiaojun. He entered China's foremost acting school, the Central Academy of Drama, in 1980. After graduating in 1984 he was assigned to the China Youth Theatre, and gave many stage performances with the troupe. He began acting in films the following year. Since 1996, he has been a professor and researcher at his own alma mater, the Central Academy of Drama. His performances for other directors have won him numerous awards at home and abroad, but it was his starring role in the TV series A BEIJINGER IN NEW YORK which made him one of the best-loved Chinese actors of his generation. He wrote and directed his own first film in 1994. IN THE HEAT OF THE SUN, adapted from a novel by Wang Shuo, won Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival for its young lead Xia Yu and numerous other prizes, including Best Feature at the Singapore Film Festival and six Golden Horse awards in Taiwan. It was cited by Richard Corliss in Time as the best film of 1995.
2010 LET THE BULLETS FLY
2007 THE SUN ALSO RISES
2000 DEVILS ON THE DOORSTEP
1993 IN THE HEAT OF THE SUN (YANGGUANG CANLAN DE RIZI)
(GUIZI LAI LE)