SYNOPSIS

So Close to Paradise narrates the vicissitudes of three rural emigrants, two boys and a girl, who come to the city for different reasons. The boys want to prosper economically, she wants to triumph as singer. The destiny will join them in the underworld of the city, where inevitably all of them will end, the boys as learners of gangsters, she as a prostitute in a hostess bar. The three will stroll for the streets without illuminating, they will be driven for the desire in dirty rooms of cracked walls, they will pass along the brothels, for caverns of low quality, believing that one day they will be able to go out of the misery … but the future has become definitively opaque for them.
A movie full of melancholy in which the director shows the marginalization in order to realize an acute portrait of the Chinese society of the nineties.

TECHNICAL DATA

Director:Wang Xiaoshuai
Screenplay: Wang Xiaoshuai, Pang Ming
Production: Hang Sanping, Li Buo, Li Xiaogeng, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang Gonggu.
Cast: Wang Tong, Shi Yu, Guo Tao, Wu Tao.
Film Editing: Liu Fang, Yang Hongyu.
Cinematography: Yang Tao.
Soundtrack: Liu Lin
Runtime: 93 min. Language: Mandarin. Subtitles: Spanish.

DIRECTOR

BIOGRAPHY

In 1993 begins the career of one of the best directors working in China today. Wang Xiaoshuai makes his debut with The Days and he prints in the movie the aroma of the nouvelle vague and reminiscences to Jean Luc Godard’s movies that characterize his first stage, set in the bohemia world and in the end of the idealism. The director shows the disillusionment of his generation and his cinema soaks in pessimism.
The second film of Wang Xiaoshuai, Frozen (1995), exemplifies how the youth dreams can be break and the useless thing that ends up by being the resistance. This time the director was based on the real story of a young man who allegedly committed suicide publicly to turn this act into a work of art while attempting to transcend that fact as a scourge vindictive against the alienation suffered by the individual within modern societies. His next film, So close to paradise (1995) had various problems to go out in the light, but when finally it did it in 1998 it confirmed that he was immersed as a director in an interesting evolutionary process. Later he will make another two films that provided a worldwide prestige; both framed in a more academic framework, The bicycle of Pekin (2001) and Dreams of Shanghai (2005).

FILMOGRAPHY

- The Days (1993)- Director and screenwriter
- Frozen (1995)- Director and screenwriter
- So Close o Paradise (1998)- Director and screenwriter
- La bicicleta de Pekín (2001)- Director and screenwriter
- Drifters (2003)- Director and screenwriter
- Shanghai Dreams (2005)- Director and screenwriter
- In Love we Trust (2007)- Director and screenwriter.