- China
NIGHT TRAIN
Synopsis
Wu Hongyan is an enforcement officer at a court in western China; her duties include dealing with women awaiting execution – mostly convicted of crimes of passion. The work has not hardened her. Every weekend, the unmarried woman in her mid-thirties takes the night train into the city for a matchmaking agency’s dance evening, though the encounters there remain inconsequential. Until she meets Li Jun, a taciturn man about whom she knows nothing and to whom she feels genuinely drawn for the first time. Diao Yinan’s “Night Train” (China 2007) links this woman’s loneliness to the coldness of her work, letting the two slowly merge.
“Night Train” is Diao Yinan’s second feature; like his debut “Uniform”, it is set in his home province of Shaanxi and was shot in and around Baoji. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2007, as one of only two Asian entries in that strand. “Night Train” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2008.
Festival
Shown at the 2008 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.
