249 Films & TV Shows Set In Asia During The 1930s
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The Mummy Returns
🇪🇬 Egypt The 1930s Ancient HistoryThe most powerful force on earth is about to be unleashed by the two people who should know better. — Rick and Evelyn O’Connell, along with their 8-year-old son Alex, discover the key to the legendary Scorpion King’s might: the fabled Bracelet of Anubis. Unfortunately, a newly resurrected Imhotep has designs on the bracelet as well, and isn’t above kidnapping its new bearer, Alex, to gain control of Anubis’s otherworldly army.
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Japanese Devils
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sA documentary recording the testimony of fourteen former Japanese soldiers as they recount atrocities and war crimes committed during the Second World War, including the the infamous Unit 731 medical experimentation group. Having been trained by their country to be nothing but killers, the soldiers claim to have become morally numb and unable to see non-Japanese as even human. Perhaps feeling some remorse for what they have done, they now choose to tell their stories for the world to hear.
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Purple Sunset
🇷🇺 Russia 🇨🇳 China The 1940s The 1930sA Soviet Russian lady officer, a Chinese peasant and a Japanese schoolgirl must walk their way out of a forest toward the end of World War II, despite their mutual distrust of one another.
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Devils on the Doorstep
Hebei Province The 1930s The 1940sDuring the Japanese occupation of China, two prisoners are dumped in a peasant's home in a small town. The owner is bullied into keeping the prisoners until the next New Year, at which time they will be collected. The village leaders convene to interrogate the prisoners. The townspeople then struggle to accommodate the prisoners. One is a bellicose Japanese nationalist, the other a nervous translator. Will the townspeople manage to keep the prisoners until the New Year?
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Heart of China
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sA story of an American pilot who crashes in China, gets rescued and falls in love with a local woman. Years later he returns to pay his respects.
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The Lost World
🇲🇳 Mongolia The 1930sThe Original Adventure To A World Like No Other — A scientist discovers dinosaurs on a remote plateau in Mongolia.
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Human Remains
🇨🇳 China 🇩🇪 Germany 🇪🇸 Spain 🇮🇹 Italy 🇷🇺 Russia The 1930s The 1950s The 1940sHuman Remains is a haunting documentary which illustrates the banality of evil by creating intimate portraits of five of the 20th century's most reviled dictators. The film unveils the personal lives of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco and Mao Tse Tung. We learn the private and mundane details of their everyday lives -- their favorite foods, films, habits and sexual preferences. There is no mention of their public lives or of their place in history. The intentional omission of the horrors for which these men were responsible hovers over the film.
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Kundun
🇮🇳 India Tibet The 1930s The 1940s The 1950sThe destiny of a people lies in the heart of a boy. — The Tibetans refer to the Dalai Lama as 'Kundun', which means 'The Presence'. He was forced to escape from his native home, Tibet, when communist China invaded and enforced an oppressive regime upon the peaceful nation. The Dalai Lama escaped to India in 1959 and has been living in exile in Dharamsala ever since.
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The Soong Sisters
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sThe Soong family was a political dynasty in China that reached the highest levels of power. This film follows the lives of the three Soong daughters, who were educated in America and returned to China. Ai-ling (the oldest) married a wealthy and powerful businessman. Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary founder of modern China. Mei-ling (the youngest) married Chiang Kai-shek, China's leader during World War II. The sisters captured the world's fascination for their brilliant marriages and their strong influence on their nation.
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Eighteen Springs
Shanghai The 1930sBased on an Eileen Chang novel, a story of romance and fate set in the Shanghai of the 1930s. Manjing (Wu Chien-lien), a young woman from a once-well-off family, works in a Shanghai factory, where she meets Shujun (Leon Lai), the son of wealthy Nanjing merchants. Despite Shujun's reservations about Manjing's family (her sister, Manlu (Anita Mui) works as a nightclub "hostess"), they manage, in stages, to fall in love. The expected progress through engagement to marriage is interrupted, first by Manjing's ambivalence about taking this step, then by Shujun's rejection of her family, and finally by that family's baroquely conceived abuse and enslavement of Shujun. After a long period of seperation, Shujun and Manjing meet, but realize that their happiness remains only in memory, in a nostalgic re-imagining of opportunities missed, understandings never arrived at.
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My Heart Is Mine Alone
🇮🇱 Israel The 1950s The 1940s The 1930s The 1920s The 1910s The 1900s The 1890s The 1880s The 1870s The 1860sHelma Sanders-Brahms directs this inventive film that uses the verse of Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler and Nazi poet Gottfried Benn to dramatize the passionate, real-life affair between the two unlikely lovers. Forced out of Germany, Lasker-Schüler makes her way to Jerusalem even as Benn discovers the true nature of the Nazi ideology he had once championed. Lena Stolze and Cornelius Obonya star.
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Shanghai 1937
Shanghai The 1930sBased on Vicki Baum's novel.
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The English Patient
🇮🇹 Italy 🇪🇬 Egypt 🇱🇾 Libya The 1940s The 1930sIn love, there are no boundaries. — In the 1930s, Count Almásy is a Hungarian map maker employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almásy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics.
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Mother Night
New York 🇩🇪 Germany 🇮🇱 Israel The 1960s The 1940s The 1930sThe truth is more shocking than the uniform he wears... HE WAS AN AMERICAN SPY. — An American spy behind the lines during WWII serves as a Nazi propagandist, a role he cannot escape in his future life as he can never reveal his real role in the war.
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Shanghai Grand
Shanghai The 1930sGangsters abound in this lively, romantic crime drama that is set in Shanghai during WW II. The tale of Taiwanese patriot Hsu Wen-Chiang begins as he is washed up on a beach near Shanghai. He is taken in by Ting Lik, a kindly beggar who is desperately in love with Feng Ching-Ching, the daughter of a prominent gangster. It isn't long before Ting Lik successfully rises through the underworld ranks to become one of the city's most powerful gangsters. Hsu is beside him all the way and uses his own power to get revenge against those who tried to have him killed much earlier. The film's later focus is on the exploits of Feng who long ago had a relationship with Hsu when he was on the lam in northern China. Back in the present, Hsu and Feng meet again by chance and they resume their affair until Hsu learns that Feng's father is one of his enemies and kills him. Poor Feng goes mad with grief. Ting finds out and swears revenge upon Hsu.
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The King of Masks
Sichuan Province The 1930sWang Bianlian is an aging street performer known as the King of Mask for his mastery of Sichuan Change Art in a true story. His wife left him with and infant son over 30 years ago. The son died from illness at age 10. This left Wang a melancholy loner aching for a male descendent to learn his rare and dying art.
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Shanghai Triad
Shanghai The 1930sIn 1930, Shanghai violence was not the problem. It was the solution. — Shanghai, China, 1930. When young Shuisheng arrives from the countryside, his uncle Liushu puts him at the service of Bijou, the mistress of Laoda, supreme boss of the Tang Triad, constantly threatened by his enemies, both those he knows and those lurking in the shadows.
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Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sBlack Sun: The Nanking Massacre, also called Men Behind the Sun 4, is a 1994 Hong Kong film directed by Mou Tun Fei and is in many ways considered to be a follow up to the 1987 shockumentary film, Men Behind the Sun. The movie depicts the events behind the Nanking Massacre committed by the Imperial Japanese army against Chinese citizens and refugees during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Like Men Behind the Sun, the film was both criticized and praised for its brutal portrayal of the Japanese atrocities, such as the notorious contest to kill 100 people using a sword, during the early and late stages of World War II, but at the same time was questioned over historical accuracy and violence which gave the film a more exploitation feel to it.
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Don't Cry, Nanking
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sIn December 1937, during the Second Japanese-Sino War, a Chinese doctor, his Japanese pregnant wife, their teenage daughter and their young son travel from Shanghai to Nanjing seeking shelter in the Capital during the Japanese invasion. The family faces the Rape of Nanking by the Imperial Japanese Army, with rapes, mass murder of prisoners of war and civilians including women, children and elders, and disrespect of international conventions.
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Fist of Legend
Shanghai Kyoto Prefecture The 1930s The 1940sTo avenge his masters death, He'll fight like never before! — Chen Zhen, a Chinese engineering student in Kyoto, who braves the insults and abuse of his Japanse fellow students for his local love Mitsuko Yamada, daughter of the director, returns in 1937 to his native Shangai, under Japanse protectorate -in fact military occupation- after reading about the death of his kung-fu master Hou Ting-An in a fight against the Japanese champion Ryuichi Akutagawa.
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Burnt by the Sun
🇷🇺 Russia The 1930sA moving and poignant story set against the corrupt politics of the Stalinist era. — Russia, 1936: revolutionary hero Colonel Kotov is spending an idyllic summer in his dacha with his young wife and six-year-old daughter Nadia and other assorted family and friends. Things change dramatically with the unheralded arrival of Cousin Dmitri from Moscow, who charms the women and little Nadia with his games and pianistic bravura. But Kotov isn't fooled: this is the time of Stalin's repression, with telephone calls in the middle of the night spelling doom - and he knows that Dmitri isn't paying a social call...
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Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey
🇷🇺 Russia New York The 1920s The 1930s The 1940sAfter escaping Russia's communist revolution, Leon Theremin travels to New York, where he pioneers the field of electronic music with his synthesizer. But at the height of his popularity, Soviet agents kidnap and force him to develop spy technology. Steven M. Martin writes and directs this intriguing documentary about a man's "strange" music and his very interesting life as an inventor and influential musician.
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Farewell My Concubine
Beijing The 1930s The 1940sAbandoned by his prostitute mother in 1920, Douzi was raised by a theater troupe. There he meets Shitou and over the following years the two develop an act entitled "Farewell My Concubine" that brings them fame and fortune. When Shitou marries Juxian, Douzi becomes jealous, the beginnings of the acting duo's explosive breakup and tragic fall take root.
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The Puppetmaster
🇹🇼 Taiwan The 1930s The 1940sIn the first half of this century, young Li Tienlu joins a travelling puppet theatre and subsequently makes a career as one of Taiwan's leading puppeteers.
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Malcolm X
Illinois Massachusetts Michigan New York 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia The 1920s The 1930s The 1940s The 1950s The 1960sA tribute to the controversial black activist and leader of the struggle for black liberation. He hit bottom during his imprisonment in the '50s, he became a Black Muslim and then a leader in the Nation of Islam. His assassination in 1965 left a legacy of self-determination and racial pride.
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