The Last Day of Winter

This is the first movie to show the Chinese Gulag, a huge labour camp in the remote north-west, and so it's no surprise that its director is one of China's ground-breaking 'fifth generation' film-makers. The stylised flashbacks to the inmates' crimes teeter on the brink of melodramatic excess, but the framing scenes in the prison are as coolly controlled and visually striking as anything in New Chinese Cinema. The movie is also startlingly candid in matters of detail, like the scene in which a woman inmate breaks down over her brother's gift - of a suitcaseful of sanitary towels.