Screened as part of NZIFF 2001

Devils on the Doorstep 2000

Guaizi lai le

Directed by Jiang Wen

China In Japanese and Mandarin with English subtitles
139 minutes 35mm / B&W and Colour

Director, Producer

Executive Producers

Dong Ping, Zheng Qwangang

Screenplay

You Fengwei, Shi Jianquan, Shu Ping, Jiang Wen. Based on a story by Jiang Wen, inspired by the novella Shengeum by You Fengwei

Photography

Gu Changwei

Editors

Zhang Yifan, Folmer Weisinger

Production Designer

Tang Shiyun

Art Director

Cai Weidong

Sound

Wu Ling

Music

Cui Jian, Liu Xing, Li Haiying

With

Jiang Wen (Ma Dasan)
,
Jiang Hongbo (Yu'er)
,
Kagawa Teruyuki (Hanara Kosaburo)
,
Yuan Ding (Dong Hanchen)
,
Cong Zhijun (Grandfather)
,
Xi Zi (Liu Wang)
,
Li Haibin ('Me')
,
Sawada Kenya (Sakatsuka Inokichi)
,
Cai Weidong (Er Bozi)
,
Chen Lianmei (Aunt)
,
Miyaji Yoshitomo (Koji Nonomura)

Awards

Grand Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival 2000

The Grand Jury Prize winner at last year’s Cannes festival is the tour de force amongst this year’s Chinese films, a blackly comic action movie set in a Chinese village occupied by Japanese forces. A brash assault on long-standing historical resentments, Devils on the Doorstep has offended Chinese censors and Japanese nationalists alike. — BG

This energetic, modern and surprisingly boisterous comedy of errors set during Japan’s occupation of China revolves around the effects of war – and even worse, humanity – on one rural Chinese village. Ma Dasan and his neighbours find their uneasy peace suddenly jeopardized when rebels unexpectedly give them two POWs for a week’s ‘safekeeping’. One prisoner, a racist Japanese soldier, provokes the villagers with threats and insults, while the other, a Chinese/Japanese interpreter, smoothly translates his slurs of ‘Die, Chinese scum’ into ‘Happy New Year, favorite Uncle’ and schemes to escape.

When no one comes to collect the captives, however, the villagers must decide whether to set them free or kill them, a choice made more difficult since, while everyone has an opinion, nobody quite knows how to kill. Merging Ealing-style village comedy with the spectacular virtuosity of an all-out war film, Devils still makes certain to foreground its humanist, intimate concerns. Best known for his lead roles in Red Sorghum and The Emperor’s Shadow, actor/director Jiang Wen keeps his film’s pace fast and the action faster à la Kusturica’s Underground and like Kusturica, wisely balances its spectacles, comedies and confusions against its overwhelming, all-too-real tragedies. — Jason Sanders, San Francisco Film Festival, 2001

Devils on the Doorstep imposingly and entertainingly combines the characteristics of a classic war drama (such as CinemaScope) with modern cinematography and montage; crowd scenes with countless extras alongside speedy handheld camerawork in dialogue scenes. Director and superstar Jiang Wen shows that the devils in the title do not necessarily have to be strangers. — Rotterdam Film Festival, 2001