Special Double Feature Price (January 6-8 & 12): See I Am Not Madame Bovary and Railroad Tigers back-to-back for just $12! Just pick the "Double Feature" price when purchasing tickets for the 7:10pm screening on the above dates.
Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing gives a deft and deeply complex performance as Li Xuelian, a woman on a darkly comic and Kafkaesque journey through the Chinese legal system in pursuit of a divorce from her husband on her very particular terms.
Li Xuelian and her husband Qin Yuhe stage a fake divorce to secure a second apartment in the city reserved by the government for single people. Qin remarries six months later – as agreed – but to a different woman. Furious, Li files a lawsuit with the county court but loses the case. Refusing to accept the court's findings, Li appeals to the chief justice, the county chief, and even the mayor, but fails at every turn. After Qin publicly accuses Li of being a "promiscuous woman" because she was not a virgin on their wedding night, Li is driven back to the courts to redeem her reputation. Li makes her way from county to city, enduring one trial after another, until she decides to make her appeal in far-off Beijing.
Ten years go by, and the cases of Li's divorce and her ruined reputation have not been resolved. Li has continued to travel to Beijing every year but must face those who wish to quash her efforts every step of the way.
Press
"It's like an odd storybook you'd find in the attic and have trouble putting down - the more quixotic Lian's journey becomes, the more you want her to see it through to the bitter end." - Village Voice
Director Biography
Born in 1958, Beijing. Feng Xiaogang emerged as one of Asia's most commercially successful directors, with his searing black comedies that mapped the lives of ordinary people in a rapidly changing China. His films became more ambitious - and were at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of China cinema - in the 2000s, with action caper A World Without Thieves (2004), luscious period fantasy The Banquet (2006), gritty war epic Assembly (2007), romantic comedy If You Are The One (2008) and earthquake drama Aftershock (2010). His divorce drama A Sigh (2000) and historical drama Back to 1942 (2012) won Best Film prizes at the Cairo and Beijing International Film Festivals respectively. He has also won Best Director three times at China's prestigious Hundred Flowers Awards. In 2016, Feng once again reinvents genre forms with his darkly comic I Am Not Madame Bovary.
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