Stand Up, Don't Grovel!

Looking for peace, quiet and privacy, a writer (Feng) and his wife move into a new apartment, only to find themselves sandwiched between conservative communist-party cadre Liu (Da) on one side and bolshie entrepreneur Zhang (Niu) on the other. Simmering tensions erupt when Zhang turns his apartment into a fish farm and strange moulds start appearing on the walls. Huang's delicious comedy (inaugurating his 'urban attitude' trilogy) is also a pitiless satire. It gets as much mileage out of the rise of get-rich-quick freelancers and the endemic spinelessness of China's intellectuals as it does out of the communists' waning sense of their own correctness and authority.