"Wu Tianming, maverick head of Xi'an Film Studios, took a two-year break from directing while he produced such ground-breaking films as Horse Thief and The Black Cannon Incident. Now he's back with another film of his home province Shaanxi. 'Old Well' is the ironic name of a village in the Taihing Mountains-ironic, because two centuries of digging for water have found nothing but dry rock. The film centers on the first scientific attempt to dig a well, supervised by the village's first university graduate, a young man who comes home and finds his life pulled every which way by the conflicting pressures of tradition and modernization. Nobody could miss the element of parable here, but larger meanings never eclipse the film's moving and carefully modulated realism. The use of direct sound (still a rarity in Chinese movies) gives it an added punch." -Tony Rayns, London Film Festival