21 Films & TV Shows Set In China During The 1970s
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Youth
Sichuan Province The 1970sA group of performing art troupe members each face their own trials and tribulations in Chengdu; from escaping a family scandal to dealing with unrequited love, each experiences rejection that shapes their lives.
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Where the Wind Settles
🇨🇳 China 🇹🇼 Taiwan The 1970s The 1960s The 1950s The 1940sThree men and an adopted son struggle in Taiwan after escaping China in 1949.
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X-Men: Days of Future Past
New York 🇫🇷 France 🇷🇺 Russia 🇨🇳 China 🇻🇳 Vietnam The 1970s The 2020sTo save the future, they must alter the past — The ultimate X-Men ensemble fights a war for the survival of the species across two time periods as they join forces with their younger selves in an epic battle that must change the past – to save our future.
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Aftershock
Hebei Province The 1970s The 2000s23 seconds, 32 years. — The epic story of a family separated as a result of the Great Tangshan Earthquake of 1976. Based on the Tangshan Earthquake in 1976 that took the lives of 240,000 people.
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Mao's Last Dancer
Texas Shandong Province The 1970s The 1980sBefore you can fly, you have to be free. — At the age of 11, Li was plucked from a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. In 1979, during a cultural exchange to Texas, he fell in love with an American woman. Two years later, he managed to defect and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet.
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24 City
Sichuan Province The 1970s The 1960s The 1950sChengdu nowadays. The state owned factory 420 shuts down to give way to a complex of luxury apartments called "24 CITY". Three generations, eight characters : old workers, factory executives and yuppies, their stories melt into the History of China.
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Peacock
Henan Province The 1970sBrings viewers into a small Chinese city and inspires familiarity with the rhythms of everyday existence, with people's dreams, shortcomings and illusions in a way that is universal.
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Everlasting Regret
Shanghai The 1970s The 1960s The 1950s The 1940sa film adaptation of Wang Anyi's popular and influential novel Changhen Ge.A person's life is destined to be shorter than that of a city. Having spent her whole life in Shanghai, Qiyao has her moments of prosperity and her fair share of loneliness. She finally fades and disappears but Shanghai remains a metropolitan city. Shanghai in the 1930s is glamorous and seductive. A pretty young girl from an ordinary family, Qiyao is lucky enough to win the 2nd runner-up of the "Miss Shanghai" contest. Mr. Cheng, her admirer as well as a photographer who assists her to her success, knows the girl is going to live an extraordinary life. It turns out she is going to witness the decades of changes to her city
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Jasmine Women
Shanghai The 1970s The 1980s The 1950s The 1930sZhang Ziyi plays the youngest of three generations of women who leads lives in Shanghai. Joan Chen plays the great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother. The film recounts this family, the mistakes they make, and a cycle that the granddaughter breaks out of.
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Shanghai Story
Shanghai The 1960s The 1970sThe film follows the rise and fall of a family in Shanghai. Once wealthy and capitalist, the family unraveled during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Their home, once a French concession mansion, was converted into a multi-family dwelling.
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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Sichuan Province The 1970sDuring the Cultural Revolution, two young men are sent to a remote mining village where they fall in love with the local tailor’s beautiful granddaughter and discover a suitcase full of forbidden Western novels.
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Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
🇨🇳 China 🇭🇰 Hong Kong The 1970sA movie within a movie, created to spoof the martial arts genre. Writer/director Steve Oedekerk uses contemporary characters and splices them into a 1970s kung-fu film, weaving the new and old together. As the main character, The Chosen One, Oedekerk sets off to avenge the deaths of his parents at the hands of kung-fu legend Master Pain. Along the way he encounters some strange characters.
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Spy Game
Jiangsu Province 🇩🇪 Germany 🇭🇰 Hong Kong 🇱🇧 Lebanon 🇻🇳 Vietnam The 1970s The 1980s The 1990sIt's not how you play the game. It's how the game plays you. — On the day of his retirement, a veteran CIA agent learns that his former protégé has been arrested in China, is sentenced to die the next morning in Beijing, and that the CIA is considering letting that happen to avoid an international scandal.
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Platform
Shanxi Province The 1980s The 1970sThe movie is set in the remote Chinese province of Fenyang, and spans the turbulent 1980s by following four performers in the state-run Peasant Culture Group. We see the group evolve from workers that are restricted to approved revolutionary classics that praise Chairman Mao, through performance of Western classics, after China adopts an 'open door' policy, and the effects on their lives.
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Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl
Sichuan Province The 1970sYoung teen girl Xiu Xiu is sent away to a remote corner of the Sichuan steppes for manual labor in 1975 (sending young people to there was a part of Cultural Revolution in China). A year later, she agrees to go to even more remote spot with a Tibetan saddle tramp Lao Jin to learn horse herding.
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Rhapsody of Spring
Beijing Shaanxi Province Xinjiang The 1960s The 1970sTracing the fascinating, real-life saga of one of China's most revered composers, master storyteller Teng Wenji sweeps us into China's intellectual and artistic coming of age during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). As a young composer, Zhao Liming (Shao Bing) struggles with a constellation of opposing forces: personal ambitions vs. communal obligation, romantic love vs. loyal friendship, modern music vs. traditional.
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Forrest Gump
Alabama Arizona California Georgia Louisiana New York Virginia District of Columbia 🇨🇳 China 🇻🇳 Vietnam The 1950s The 1960s The 1970s The 1980sLife is like a box of chocolates...you never know what you're gonna get. — A man with a low IQ has accomplished great things in his life and been present during significant historic events—in each case, far exceeding what anyone imagined he could do. But despite all he has achieved, his one true love eludes him.
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Portrait of a Fanatic
🇨🇳 China The 1970s The 1960s The 1940s The 1930sIn 1949 when the Communist regime was established in China, the world-famed painter Ling Chen-kuang, believing his conviction for a new-born society had come true on his motherland, returned anxiously from the U.S., whither he had fled apprehension by lawmen when cracking down on rebellious activities he had actively engaged in out of cynicism and hostility – the feelings evolved from constant haunting by the memories of his childhood miserableness – to the then existing institutions in China. Alas, to his disillusion, the land he had so deeply loved, the society of which he had expected so much, should have turned out to be the hell on earth. Why? The enigma kept obsessing and puzzling him even to his dying moment.
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Enter the Dragon
California Henan Province 🇭🇰 Hong Kong The 1970sTheir deadly mission: to crack the forbidden island of Han! — A martial artist agrees to spy on a reclusive crime lord using his invitation to a tournament there as cover.
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Fire Under the Snow
Tibet The 1930s The 1960s The 1970s The 1980sPalden Gyatso, a Buddhist monk since childhood, was arrested by the Chinese Communist Army in 1959. He spent the next 33 years in prison for the "crimes" of peaceful demonstration and refusal to denounce his apolitical teacher as an Indian spy. He was tortured, starved and sentenced to hard labor. He watched his nation and culture destroyed, his teachers, friends and family displaced, jailed or killed under Chinese occupation. Fire Under the Snow reaches back to Palden's birth in 1933 and follows him through the Orwellian nightmare that began with the Chinese invasion. We cut back and forth between the past and Palden's present as an activist, living in exile. Our P.O.V. becomes a "third eye" hovering over Palden’s current life, haunted by his memories of the past. We explore the escalating cycle of interrogation and physical violation during his years in prison that ended decades later with Palden's escape from Tibet and a cathartic meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
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English
Xinjiang The 1970sA child's-eye story of Shanghainese settlers in Xinjiang during the late Mao era.
