Young Style

In his final year of high school, with the university entrance exam bearing down on him, Ju Ran is carried off by his feelings for a girl in his class and fails it. Given the chance to repeat the year, he starts both the exam and high school over again. The film is about that second year, about the speed the gaokao forces on a person and the friendships that form inside a classroom under that pressure, and it ends by saying that a second chance is not perfect either. Liu Jie does not reduce it to one boy’s crush; he keeps in frame the weight of a system that ties a whole generation to a single day of examinations. Dong Zijian leads, with Qin Hailu and Yong Mei alongside. It was named best film in the film channel media awards at the sixteenth Shanghai International Film Festival in June 2013 and opened in China on 2 August 2013.