This Life of Mine

The film tells fifty years through the life of an ordinary policeman working in Beijing. Wars, revolutions and changing governments from the turn of the century to 1950 pass across the man’s shoulders. The account does not describe great events from a distance; it turns them into a family’s worry about making a living, its tiredness and its shrinking hope. The policeman does the same job in every period, but every period wants something different from him. Corrupt politics is one of the points the film keeps returning to. Shi Hui both directs and plays the lead. Putting the fifty years of a country and the lifetime of a single man in the same frame is the film’s own choice. Wei Heling, Cui Chaoming and Shen Yang also appear in Shi Hui’s hundred and twenty minute Chinese film, completed in 1950.