Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

During the Cultural Revolution, two young men from bourgeois families are sent for re-education to a remote mountain village in Sichuan. Their days are spent hauling coal and working the rice paddies. Then they find a suitcase: inside are Chinese translations of banned Western novels. Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert. They begin reading the books to the village tailor's granddaughter, and she begins to change, though not in the direction they expected. Dai Sijie adapted his own novel, and the novel draws on his own life: he was held in a re-education camp in Sichuan between 1971 and 1974. The film was shot in China and then banned there, as the book had been before it. Zhou Xun plays the seamstress, with Chen Kun and Liu Ye as the two young men. Who it's for: Anyone interested in the Cultural Revolution, narratives about literature's power to transform, and Chinese cinema. Who it's not for: The telling is nostalgic and softens the harshness of the period. The young woman's development is also largely constructed through the gaze of the two men.