The Story of Qiu Ju

Qiu Ju, pregnant, wants an apology rather than compensation after the village chief kicks her husband. When nobody will give her one she goes from the village to the district, from the district to the province, and finally to court. The whole film is how far that stubbornness takes a woman. Zhang Yimou directed and Gong Li stars. The method was unusual. Many of the city scenes were shot with hidden cameras among real people on the street, so daily life in early nineties China went into the film with them. Roger Ebert praised it, writing that along the way we absorb more information about the lives of ordinary people in everyday China than in any other film he had seen. It won the Golden Lion at the 1992 Venice Film Festival, with Gong Li taking the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 87 percent. The New York Times included it in its list of the best 1,000 films ever made. What arrives at the end is not a victory: an X-ray reveals another injury and justice comes in a form Qiu Ju did not want. Who it is for: viewers who like slow, observational films built out of daily life. Who it is not for: anyone expecting dramatic escalation. The film repeats the same journey again and again on purpose.