The Bird People in China

Mr Wada, a company man, is sent to assess a jade deposit in a remote village in Yunnan. With him are Ujiie, a yakuza collecting his firm's debt, and a Chinese guide. In the village they find a school where children are taught to fly, the method based on papers left years earlier by a Royal Air Force pilot. Takashi Miike directed. Beside the films he is known for, this one is markedly mellow, built around ecology and cultural collision. At the end the person who wants to stop development turns out, surprisingly, to be the yakuza. It was shot in real Chinese locations, using Dali City and the Nujiang River, an unusual geography for Japanese cinema at the time. It won the Audience Award at the 1998 Hawaii International Film Festival, which is to say it reached beyond Miike's core following. Who it is for: anyone who knows Miike only through violence, and viewers who like slow, strange, well-meaning films. Who it is not for: anyone uneasy with stories that look for lost wisdom in the East. The film speaks from inside that template.