Li Shaohong (Director)

Born: 1955



Li's pictures are shot by her cinematographer husband, Zheng Nianping.

On Blush, she collaborated with the BFA teacher and film critic Ni Zhen, who also worked on the script for Raise the Red Lantern.






Jonathan Rosenbaum: "Blush was adapted by director Li Shaohong from a novel by Su Tong, a popular short-story writer whose better-known works include “Wives and Concubines,” the basis for Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern... The only female member of China’s celebrated Fifth Generation of filmmakers [sic?], Li was born in 1955, but has made only four features to date. I haven’t seen the first, The Case of the Silver Snake (1988), a thriller commissioned by the Beijing Film Studio. But my interest was piqued by the second — a loose adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold known here as Bloody Dawn or Bloody Morning (1990); it was banned by the Chinese government but shown abroad. The third, a nuanced contemporary comedy-drama called Family Portrait, was even better."

Wu Ziniu (Director)

Born: 1953, Lechuan, Sichuan province. Fifth Generation director.

His film The Dove Tree (1985) was the first Fifth Generation film to be banned.

Zhang Zeming (Director)

Born: 1951, Guangzhou. Fifth Generation director, although not part of the 1982 graduates of the Beijing Film Academy. He twice tried to get in but twice failed, before getting a job working at the Pearl River Studio in Guangzhou.


http://www.scmp.com/article/641210/also-showing-zhang-zeming

Xie Fei (Director)

Born: 1942, Yan'an.

• Graduated from Beijing Film Academy in the mid-1960s as part of the Fourth Generation, but like his peers did not get the freedom to make the films he wanted due to the Cultural Revolution. Instead, greater artistic openings only came for him in the 1980s and 90s, contemporaneous to the horizon-expanding of the 5th Generation's cinema.
• His 'real' (non-propaganda) debut came in 1983 with the film Our Fields, when Xie was already in his fourties.
• His two most famous and internationally acclaimed films are Black Snow (1990), and Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls (1993), recipients of the Silver and Golden Bear respectively at Berlinale.
• Currently teaches at the Beijing Film Academy, where he has taught since its post-CR re-opening, and hence he taught members of the Fifth Generation (remember in his talk, he spoke of their obsessive film-watching in all-nighter session with only Chinese buns to keep them going). He himself claims that in his peak years he taught for 2 years out of 3, and shot a film in the other year, with the twin practices of teaching and filming both reinforcing each other.
• Has made a number of films set in, shot in and specifically about Chinese ethnic minority regions and peoples (Mongolia and Tibet), much like Tian Zhuangzhuang or some of the NIC films, such as Gabbeh. 

Filmography:

• ...
• Our Fields (1983)
• A Girl from Hunan (1986)
• Black Snow (1990)
• Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls (1993)
• A Mongolian Tale (1995)
• Song of Tibet (2000)

References:
Live talk with Xie at BFI, August 2014
Interview + booklet on Black Snow DVD, Second Run

Huang Jianxin (Director)

Born: 1954, Xi'an. 'Fifth Generation' director, although not technically a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, but he did study some courses there over a year period after the 1982 graduation of the so-called 'Fifth Generation' graduates.
While at Xi'an Film Studio, he was spotted as one of the most promising assistant directors, and then-studio head Wu Tianming recommended he go take the intensive directing course at the BFA. Made an early short film which had censorship problems.made his first feature film The Black Cannon Incident in 1984, which in the context of post-Mao China under Deng Xiaoping was a particularly scathing and audacious piece of satire. His next two films continued to tread similar ground, being cynical satires and exposes of China's bureaucracy and underlying failure to truly modernise beyond surface rhetoric. The three of them together have been called a 'post-socialist trilogy'.

In recent years, he has apparently changed (or been forced to) in his filmmaking interests, and has made a series of state-commissioned propaganda epics.

References:
Pickowicz in New Chinese Cinemas, 54-.

Zhang Junzhao (Director)

Born: 1952, Henan.
Raised in Xinjiang province, in the uppermost north-west corner of China. His high-school education, like many others, was interrupted in 1966 with the start of the Cultural Revolution. He then joined the army as an ordinary soldier. For a while he would work for the Urumqi People's Theatre, from 1974 on.  He enrolled to the directors' course at Beijing Film Academy in 1978 and was hence a 'Fifth Generation' Graduate in 1982. Was sent to work at Guangxi Film Studio, where alongside Zhang Yimou, Xiao Feng and He Qun, he set up a 'Youth Film Unit' and made the film The One and the Eight.

After his debut film however, he moved on to making more commercially minded films. He was effectively then the first of the young 'fifth generation' graduates to turn to more commercial box-office oriented filmmaking. His films after The One and the Eight included a football film (Come On, China!), the bandit movie The Lonely Murderer, and a psycho-thriller (Arc Light), none of which gained anywhere near the same critical acclaim or influence. He also made some TV dramas.

References:
Interview with him in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 130-3.
Brief profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 200.

Wu Tianming (Director, Industry)

 (1939-2014).
Director associated with the 'Fourth Generation'. Graduated from Beijing FIlm Academy, in late 1970s, but only from one of the intensive short courses open to studio employees.
Born in 1939 in Shaanxi province, north of Xi'an. His father was a Communist Party veteran. Began as an actor in the early 1960s. He moved to directing in 1979, after attending one of the short courses at the BFA. After directing several films there, he was elected to be head at Xi'an Film Studio in late 1983. In this position he would strongly encourage younger talents and act as a mentor-like producer of Fifth Generation films, from 1984 to 1989, where he made it a policy to give opportunities to young directors.
In 1986, he made it studio policy to specialise in what he termed 'westerns', an elastic term standing for any film set in the vast rural provinces of China, anywhere from Tibet in the West to to Yunnan in the South and Xinjiang in the North. The argument went that the bigger city-based studios like Shanghai and Beijing could cover urban films. This therefore gave an official justification for the rural-based films made by Fifth Generation directors, other than the more likely predilection behind it, namely their own pasts as sent-down youths who were relocated to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, Xi'an Film Studio produced such key films by all major directors of the era, such as The Horse Thief, The Black Cannon Incident, King of the Children and Red Sorghum.
His own directorial career, naturally halted like those of other Fourth Generation directors due to their prime years coinciding with the barren era of the Cultural Revolution, was rejuvenated by the influence of the Fifth Generation's innovation and output.
Spent some years between 1989 and 1994 in exile in the US.


References:
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 196.
Rayns, The New Chinese Cinema.

Tian Zhuangzhuang (Director)

Born: 1952, Beijing.
His parents were both prominent in the Chinese film industry; his father Tian Fang was an actor and one-time Vice-head of the Ministry of Culture's Film Bureau, and his mother Yu Lan was a major star actress. He used to tag along to censorship board screenings with his father as a child, although he avoided films after the age of 12 after vomiting due to sitting too near the screen during the screening of a Soviet epic. 

In 1968 he was sent to Jilin province (north-east) as part of the 'sent-down youth' during the Cultural Revolution, and one year later he joined the army. He trained as photographer and cinematographer at the Beijing Agricultural Film Studio in the late 1970s. In 1978, he was admitted into the director's course at the Beijing Film Academy.
Already during his time as a student there, he made a name for himself with a TV play called Our Corner, which already featured minimal dialogue and naturalism - thereby foreshadowing the change from dramatic conventions.
He caused more of a stir, and controversy, with his early films On the Hunting Ground and The Horse Thief. They are almost non-narrative, quasi-documentaries about Chinese ethnic minorities, with spectacular visuals. However their strangeness and difficulty alienated the Chinese audience, while winning plaudits abroad.

He faced a ban after he made The Blue Kite, and did not direct another film for 10 years (his return to directing would be a remake of Fei Mu's Springtime in a Small Town). During these 10 years he did much work as producer, advisor and mentor to the new generation of younger filmmakers, helping them get their projects off the ground.

He has also composed some of the music for his films (e.g Horse Thief) as well as for Chen Kaige's King of the Children, and Life on a String.

In 2003 he made the video documentary Delamu, which depicts the peaceful life of different ethnic communities along the mythic millennia-old Tea Horse Road, and can be seen as a return to the ethnographic interest in ethnic minorities of his early films. "Arguing that there is only a thin line between documentary and fictional feature film, referencing his two previous documentary-like movies (Zhang and Jie 2004: 34), Tian may want to justify why Delamu does not focus strongly on specific histories (though the film has touched on some interviewees’ personal histories in a rather disperse and disorganized way) and social facts (of the ancient Tea Horse Road and the ethnic peoples living along it) but rather on his own personal feelings about the environments and the life stories of the inhabitants in order to convey humanistic issues such as universal human conditions, the meaning of life, and eternal truth. In short, Tian apparently appeals more to universalist ideology than to ethnic particularism, which is conventionally an attractive aspect of ethnicthemed productions." [Kwai-Cheung Lo]

"In his two minority feature films, On the Hunting Ground (Liechang zasa, 1985) and Horse Thief (Daoma zei, 1986), Tian Zhuangzhuang created a new cinematic model through his documentary approach, which subverted the melodramatic pattern of his predecessors in socialist-realist cinema. Both films emphasize the relationship between individuals and their communities. On the one hand, these communities reject any transgressor of their rules. On the other, the arbitrariness of the rules seem to invite transgression and make conformity to the rules difficult, if not impossible. Using minority cultures as allegories of the dominant Han culture, Tian’s films revive the nightmarish situation of the Cultural Revolution indirectly." [Lu Tonglin]

Filmography:

• On the Hunting Ground (1984)
• The Horse Thief (1985)
• The Blue Kite (1993)

Personal quotes:

• "I shot The Horse Thief for audiences of the next century to watch."
• "If it hadn't been for Yellow Earth, there couldn't have been the whole debate about film aesthetics, and there couldn't have been the overall progress that cinema has made."
• "Wu Tianming once said 'I'd rather a film didn't sell a single copy, just so long as the quality is good'. I don't think one should fixate on one person's works, or on a group of people's works. Let's have less yelling and shouting just because one person's work is slightly different from the general run."
• "The theme of [The Horse Thief] is very simple, in fact - the relationships between humanity and religion, and between humanity and nature. Its message is quite clear, too, otherwise how would we have been able to make sense of our fanaticism during the Cultural Revolution?"

References:
Interview, Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 127-.
Profile in idem, 194.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070416073506/http://kinema.uwaterloo.ca/ghy-941.htm

Chen Kaige (Director)

Born: 1952, Beijing. Fifth Generation director and Beijing Film Academy graduate.

Was born into a film family, much like Tian Zhuangzhuang. His father, Chen Huaikai, had made his name at Beijing Film Studio making Chinese opera films, and his mother worked as a script editor. In 1966, his high school education was cut short by the start of the Cultural Revolution. In 1968, he was sent, along with schoolmates, to Yunnan province (South-west) as a zhiqing. There, he worked in a rubber plantation for three-five(?) years, a formative experience that would shape his outlook on life and open his eyes to the discrepancies between ideology he had been taught and reality. He also joined the army, leaving his plantation job but staying in Yunnan, and served patrolling the border with Vietnam (still some years before the Sino-Vietnamese border war of 1979). In 1973, he moved back to Beijing where he ended up working in a factory(?).

In 1975, he found work in a film processing laboratory in Beijing. In 1978 he applied to the Beijing Film Academy and was accepted.

After graduating, he initially worked as assistant to older director Huang Jianzhong at Beijing Film Studio, working on two films under him (interestingly Huang's later films were themselves more experimental, perhaps indicating some influence from the spirit of innovation of the younger director and his peers at the time).

In 1984, following the success of his fellow BFA graduates Zhang Yimou, He Qun and Zhang Junzhao in making The One and the Eight at Guangxi Film Studio, he applied to be relocated to join them at Guangxi.Once there, in collaboration with Zhang Yimou and He, Chen directed Yellow Earth and The Big Parade. The latter film was involved in a dispute with the authorities over censorship and final cut, which probably led Chen to agree to sign up to make a film for Wu Tianming at Xi'an Film Studio. This would end up being King of the Children.


In 1988, he took up a fellowship at New York University and stayed there through 1989, making a Duran Duran music video in an attempt to raise funds for future projects he had planned.




Filmography:

• Yellow Earth (1984)
• The Big Parade (1986)
• King of the Children (1987) 
• Life on a String (1991)
• Farewell My Concubine (1993)

References:

http://filmmakermagazine.com/72318-the-studios-are-dead-chen-kaige-on-chinas-new-filmmaking-machine/#.VAJrLPldXqk
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 188.

Zhang Yimou (Director)

Born: 1951 (1950?), Xi'an.
His mother was a dermatologist, his father could not find work due to being effectively politically blacklisted (he had been an officer in the KMT army before 1949). During the Cultural Revolution, in 1969, he was sent to a village north of Xi'an, working as a farmer. He was later transferred to a cotton mill 40 km from Xi'an, in the small city of Xianyang, and whilst there he took up photography and painting. One famous anecdote tells of his managing to save enough money to buy his first camera by donating blood.

 His application in 1978 to the Beijing Film Academy was initially rejected due to his being over the age limit, but this was overturned after pleas to the Academy's heads and the Minister of Culture. He was allowed in despite his age, considering his evident photographic ability and strong entrance-exam results.
After graduation in 1982, he was sent off to the small, regional-outpost studio Guangxi Film Studio. There, his talents as cinematographer would shine in the films The One and the Eight, Yellow Earth and The Big Parade.
Later on, in 1985, he would move back to his home town of Xi'an, 'on loan' to the Xi'an Film Studio, under the leadership of the influential mentor-like producer/director Wu Tianming. There, he would show off more of his versatility, by acting the lead part in Wu's film The Old Well, for which he'd win a Best Actor award at Tokyo Film Festival. Still at Xi'an Film Studio, he would try his own hand at directing, and made his first three films there: Red Sorghum, Codename Puma (aka Codename Cougar, an action film obviously in part prescribed by box-office pressures) and Ju Dou.

His visual style is characterised by vivid use of colours and colour-coding for symbolic purposes within segments of the same film; by striking framing compositions and by frequently immobile camera shots. It seems easy to connect these to his early sensibilities as a still photographer. The versatility of his visual style can be seen for example, by the difference between the highly stylised sets and colour compositions of Raise the Red Lantern, and the far more neo-realist feel and unadorned depiction of rural China in The Story of Qiu Ju.


Filmography (as director):

• Red Sorghum (1987)
• Codename Cougar (1988)
• Ju Dou (1989)
• Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
• The Story of Qiu Ju (1992)
• 
  

Resources:
"Zhang Yimou: Local Hero" --- Stuart Klawans, Film Comment, Sep-Oct 1995.

http://www.chinesefilms.cn/141/2011/12/21/201s6386.htm
http://www.clockwatching.net/~vroom/zyimou.html
http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6561
http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/zhang/
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 201.
Cardullo, Essay and Interview in Out of Asia, 111.

http://offscreen.com/view/hou_yong