Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
Jingchun Wang | ... | Yaojun Liu | |
Mei Yong | ... | Liyun Wang | |
Xi Qi | ... | Moli Shen | |
Roy Wang | ... | Xing Liu (15 Years) (as Yuan Wang) | |
Jiang Du | ... | Hao Shen | |
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Liya Ai | ... | Haiyan Li |
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Cheng Xu | ... | Yingming Shen |
Jingjing Li | ... | Meiyu Gao | |
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Zhao-Yan Guo-Zhang | ... | Xinjian Zhang (as Yangouzhang Zhao) |
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Zhenjiang Bao | ... | Chairman |
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Shuang Wu | ... | Moli Shen (17 Years) |
Zizi Wang | ... | Jing Tong | |
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Xinyuan Zhang | ... | Hao Shen (12 Years) |
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Jiachen Wu | ... | Xing Liu (12 Years) |
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Yajun Wang | ... | Yaojun Liu's Sister |
'We're waiting to grow old'. This sentence briefly sums up Yaoyun and his wife Liyun's bitter realization about their lives. They were once a happy family - until their son drowned playing by a reservoir. And so Yaojun and Liyun leave their home and plunge into the big city, although nobody knows them there and they cannot even understand the local dialect. Their adopted son Liu Xing does not offer them the comfort they had hoped for either. Defiantly rejecting his 'foreign' parents, he one day disappears altogether. The married couple are repeatedly enmeshed in their memories. Finally, they decide to return to the site of their lost hopes. In this family saga spanning three decades of Chinese history, the private and the political merge and the individual gets caught up in the gears of a society in the throes of constant change. Part melodrama, part critique of the times, this film takes us from the country's upheaval in the 1980s following the Cultural Revolution to the prospering ... Written by Anonymous
"This consistently smoldering drama begins with ominous scenes of two young school kids, Xingxing (Wu Jiachen) and Haohao (Zhang Xinyuan), while the latter is mad keen in joining a bunch of skylarking kids near a reservoir, the former balks on account of the fact that he cannot swim. Then jumps to Xingxing's parents Liu Yaojun (Wang Jingchun) and Wang Liyun (Yong Mei), and Xingxing apparently returns home safely. Nothing happens, apparently. "
read my full review on my blog: cinema omnivore, thanks