Guizi lai le (2000)

Director:

Wen Jiang

Writers:

Wen Jiang (screenplay)
Wen Jiang (story)

Release Date:

14 March 2001 (France)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama | War

Plot:

During the Japanese occupation of China, two prisoners are dumped in a peasant's home in a small town...

Plot Keywords:

Prisoner | Japanese | Japanese Occupation | China | Village

Awards:

6 wins & 1 nomination

Cast

Wen Jiang	...	Ma Dasan
Yihong Jiang	...	Yu'er (as Hongbo Jiang)
Teruyuki Kagawa	...	Kosaburo Hanaya
Ding Yuan	...	Dong Hanchen
Zhijun Cong	...	Grandfather
Zi Xi	...	Liu Wang
Haibin Li	...	Me
Kenya Sawada	...	Inokichi Sakatsuka
Weidong Cai	...	Er Bozi
Lianmei Chen	...	Aunt
Yoshimoto Miyaji	...	Koji Nonomura
Qiang Chen	...	'One-Stroke' Liu
David Wu	...	Major Gao

Also Known As:

Devils on the Doorstep (International: English title)

Runtime:

139 min | France:162 min (Cannes Film Festival)

Country:

China

Language:

Mandarin | Japanese | English

Color:

Black and White | Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby SR

Certification:

South Korea:15 | France:U | Netherlands:16

Company:

Asian Union Film & Entertainment

A must-see film, especially for Chinese

This is the second time I see this film. As a Chinese, I feel a strong urge as well as an obligation to write some comment about it. I can safely conclude that the film vividly showed what the real situation was during the Japanese occupation in China back in WW2.

It is totally different from those main-stream anti-Japanese war films we can see throughout our early life, which still can be seen being replayed in CCTV (China Central Television) over and again again. In those films, almost all Chinese, young or old, men or women, were all warriors fighting against the Japanese invaders. We all know that it wasn't true. From this film, we can see how ignorant and stupid those Chinese peasants were. It gives us a chance to review what was really going on during that time. It is a history we cannot deny. As a matter of fact, this film was banned in mainland China by some kind of a "censorship" mainly because it revealed so much truth.

The director of the film, Jiangwen, is my only favorite director from China. You can say he is ambitious, a genius or whatever. But i say that he is a director with a sense of responsibility to our nation, to our people, to those heroes and civilians died in the war. He is not afraid to dig up the less-bright side of the history and present it to us, to those younger generation who never go through the war. It reminds us never to forget history.