ONE SECOND

China | 2020 | DCP | 104 min. | Mandarin with English subtitles
Director: Zhang Yimou
Cast: Liu Haocun, Zhang Yi, Fan Wei

Acclaimed Fifth Generation Chinese director Zhang Yimou’s (Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, Shadow) masterpiece is set during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s. Between two remote outposts in the Gobi Desert, a purloined single reel of 35mm film becomes the prized object in an extended cat-and-mouse game between an escaped political prisoner and a scrappy, orphaned teenage girl. The battling protagonists’ separate reasons for wanting to possess the reel are slowly revealed after they hike their way to the next village oasis and encounter the film’s original owner, a rather arrogant traveling projectionist who faces his own difficulties while preparing to put on an evening screening of the 1964 propaganda epic, Heroic Sons and Daughters, for the local citizens. Soon, the three main characters’ individual struggles are laid bare while they join forces with the tiny community to ensure that the show goes on. Employing accurately austere period detail and seamlessly blending the comic hijinks of the opening with the emotional drama of the second half, Zhang has delivered an undeniable love letter to the power of cinema and a gift to cinephiles everywhere.