Photo: © 2016 Enlight Media Co Ltd; Courtesy of IM Global
Blood of Youth
NYAFF has long-championed Yang Shupeng, a self-taught fireman-turned-director who is one of China's least known, most maverick filmmakers. Following three period films, The Cold Flame (that rare thing, a historically accurate Sino-Japanese war drama), The Robbers (a blackly comic homage to Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai), and An Inaccurate Memoir (a.k.a. Eastern Bandits, a wartime bandit opera that we likened to "an undiscovered Peckinpah Western"), Yang's fourth feature is his first contemporary film. The high-concept crime drama-thriller is centered around young hacker Su Ang who separately directs the police to a skeleton in the woods, and to the scene of an imminent bank heist. But just as the law closes in, he warns off the robbers on their phones, giving them steer-by-steer directions on how to evade the cops in a thrilling car chase scene. Su has his own agenda, and he's casting his net wider and wider.
