UNIFORM

Uniform (Zhifu) China

Nominated for a Tiger award at Rotterdam this year, and the winner of the coveted Dragons & Tigers Award for Young Cinema at the Vancouver International Film Festival, Uniform is a powerful film from the burgeoning underground Chinese cinema.

'Diao Yinan's debut feature is in the gritty, new realist style'and subject'often typical of this new direction. Set in an industrial city in a remote part of China, it focuses on a young man earning a modest income in a laundry while trying to get his sick father's pension from the closed down factory. A policeman's uniform remains unclaimed at the laundry and one day he tries it on. He discovers he can get away posing as a policeman, and he likes his new power. It helps him pick up a girl in the record store and he can generate extra cash from small time bribes. In deceptively simple but resonant images and using a restrained amount of dialogue, Diao effortlessly and convincingly evokes the world of his lumpen anti-hero, following him towards his almost inevitable downfall and setting him against the backdrop of a China we rarely see.' -Rotterdam International Film Festival

D/S Diao Yinan P Kit Ming, Iku Ishikawa WS Ying E Chi Ltd. L Mandarin w/English subtitles TD Video/Col/2003/92mins

Diao Yinan's films: Uniform (MIFF 2004).