Seventeen Years

Seventeen years after accidentally murdering her stepsister in a fight, Tao Xiaolan (Liu) is given a new year furlough from prison. Since no one shows up to collect her, young prison guard Chen (Li Bingbing) offers to escort her home. But the family house in Tianjin has been demolished. In the course of finding where Tao's parents now live (and steering the nervous woman into a reunion with them), Tao and Chen form an unexpected bond. Zhang's first fiction feature since his rapprochement with the Film Bureau is a solid art movie: sensitive, understated, psychologically acute and quietly emotive. In other words, less interesting than the risky, provocative and often revelatory work he did as an 'illegal' underground film-maker.