Blood of Youth

NYAFF has long championed Yang Shupeng, a self-taught fireman-turned-filmmaker who is one of China’s least known maverick directors. Following three period films, The Cold Flame (that rare thing, a historically accurate Sino-Japanese war drama), The Robbers (a blackly comic homage to Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai), and An Inaccurate Memoir (aka Eastern Bandits, a wartime bandit opera that we likened to “an undiscovered Peckinpah Western”), Yang’s fourth feature is his first contemporary film. The high-concept thriller is centered around young hacker Su Ang, who directs the police both to a skeleton in the woods and to the scene of an imminent bank heist. But just as the law closes in, he warns the robbers on their phones, giving them directions on how to evade the cops in a thrilling car chase scene. Su has his own agenda, and he’s casting his net wider and wider. Director Yang Shupeng in attendance. North American Premiere.

Co-presented with Confucius Institute Headquarters and China Institute