282 Films & TV Shows Set In China During The 20th Century
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The Painted Veil
England 🇮🇹 Italy Shanghai The 1920sSometimes the greatest journey is the distance between two people. — A British medical doctor fights a cholera outbreak in a small Chinese village, while also being trapped at home in a loveless marriage to an unfaithful wife.
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Summer Palace
Beijing Chongqing Municipality Hubei Province The 1990s The 1980sCountry girl Yu Hong leaves her village, her family and her lover to study in Beijing. At university, she discovers an intense world of sexual freedom and forbidden pleasure. Enraptured, compulsive, she falls madly in love with fellow student Zhou Wei. Driven by obsessive passions they can neither understand nor control, their relationship becomes one of dangerous games - betrayals, recriminations, provocations - as all around them, their fellow students begin to demonstrate, demanding democracy and freedom.
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The Go Master
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sThe Go Master is a 2006 biopic by director Tian Zhuangzhuang of renowned twentieth century Go master Wu Qingyuan, better known by his adopted name of Go Seigen. The film, which premiered at the 44th New York Film Festival, focuses on the life of this extraordinary player from his meteoric rise as a child prodigy to fame and fortune as a revolutionary strategic thinker, as well as the tumultuous global conflicts between his homeland and his adopted nation. The film also features a scene involving the Atomic bomb go game.
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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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The White Countess
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sIin 1930s Shanghai, 'The White Countess' is both Sofia—a fallen member of the Russian aristocracy—and a nightclub created by a blind American diplomat, who asks Sofia to be the centerpiece of the world he wants to create.
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Perhaps Love
Beijing Shanghai The 1990sA love triangle develops during the making of a musical in mainland China.
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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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On the Mountain of Tai Hang
🇨🇳 China The 1930s The 1940sOn the Mountain of Tai Hang tells the story of the Sino-Japanese war and the commander-in-chief, Zhu De, leading the main force of the Eighth Route Army to the battlefront against the Japanese invaders. Presented are several important campaigns, from September 1937 to May 1940, including the Pingxingguan victory, the surprise attack on Yangmingbao, Xinkou campaign and Huangtuling campaign, where Abuguixiu, lieutenant general of the Japanese army, was shot down. The film also reflects the close relationship between the Eighth Route Army and the people.
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Dam Street
Sichuan Province The 1980sLoneliness, saving face, and public mores. In 1983 in China, Yun is a bright schoolgirl who gets pregnant. She's expelled, her boyfriend leaves town, and her mother arranges the baby's adoption, telling Yun the child died at birth. Ten years later, Yun sings pop songs in a dive, takes the occasional married lover, and lives with her mother, a teacher. The mother tutors a student, Xiao-yong, a lad of ten, who becomes attached to Yun. Yun's mother discovers who the boy's really is and a struggle begins. Should he be told; should Yun reclaim him; does her mother's opinion matter; what about the woman who's raised him? Is there room in a Chinese town for a woman to breathe?
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Shanghai Dreams
Guizhou Province The 1980sIn the 1960s, encouraged by the government, a large number of families leave Chinese cities to settle in the poorer regions of the country, in order to develop local industry. The film's main character is a 19 year old girl who lives in the Guizhou province, where her parents have settled. That's where she has grown up, where her friends are and where she first experiences love. But her father believes that their future lies in Shanghai. How can they all keep on living together when they don't share the same dreams?
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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
New York Tibet The 1930sWho will save us? — When gigantic robots attack New York City, "Sky Captain" uses his private air force to fight them off. His ex-girlfriend, reporter Polly Perkins, has been investigating the recent disappearance of prominent scientists. Suspecting a link between the global robot attacks and missing men, Sky Captain and Polly decide to work together. They fly to the Himalayas in pursuit of the mysterious Dr. Totenkopf, the mastermind behind the robots.
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Kung Fu Hustle
Shanghai The 1940s The 1930sSo many gangsters...so little time. — Set in Canton, China in the 1940s, the story revolves in a town ruled by the Axe Gang, Sing who desperately wants to become a member. He stumbles into a slum ruled by eccentric landlords who turns out to be the greatest kung-fu masters in disguise. Sing's actions eventually cause the Axe Gang and the slumlords to engage in an explosive kung-fu battle. Only one side will win and only one hero will emerge as the greatest kung-fu master of all.
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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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Letter from an Unknown Woman
Beijing The 1940s The 1930sPeking, 1948. A winter night. A man returns home to find a letter awaiting him written by a woman before her death. in the letter she tells him the story of her love for him -a life-long passion that has not diminished over time, but one that he has never known. her story spans 18 years from the moment she -then a 13 year-old girl- sets her eyes on her new neighbor. she tells their brief but passionate love in her youthi the hardship she goes through raising their child alone, and their final encounter after the war, during which the man fails tor ecognize her and one which leaves her in despair. Now having lost her son, she no longer has the courage to live on. Only in a letter is she capable of telling him everything, for the first and the last time. shaken by the letter, the man searches his memory for the nameless woman.
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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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Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
California Inner Mongolia The 1990s The 2000sThis summer the Angels are back. — The Angels are charged with finding a pair of missing rings that are encoded with the personal information of members of the Witness Protection Program. As informants are killed, the ladies target a rogue agent who might be responsible.
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Purple Butterfly
Shanghai The 1930s The 1940sDing Hui is a member of Purple Butterfly, a powerful resistance group in Japanese occupied Shanghai. An unexpected encounter reunites her with Itami, an ex-lover... and officer with a secret police unit tasked with dismantling Purple Butterfly.
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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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Shanghai Ghetto
Shanghai The 1930sIn 1939, the last hope for thousands of Jews lay in the last place on Earth the Nazis would look. — SHANGHAI GHETTO recalls the strange-but-true story of thousands of European Jews who were shut out of country after country while trying to escape Nazi persecution in the late 1930s. Left without options or entrance visas, a beacon of hope materialized for them on the other side of the world, and in the unlikeliest of places, Japanese-controlled Shanghai. Fleeing for their lives, these Jewish refugees journeyed to form a settlement in the exotic city, penniless and unprepared for their new life in the Far East. At the turn of the new millennium, filmmakers Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amire Mann boldly snuck into China with two survivors and a digital camera to shoot at the site of the original Shanghai Ghetto, unchanged since WWII.
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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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Lan Yu
Beijing The 1980s The 1990sA love story between a country boy in Beijing to study and a wealthy businessman set against the backdrop of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident
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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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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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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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