(Huang-tudi) Note: Director Chen Kaige will be our guest on Friday, January 29 with the local premiere of his film The Big Parade. Derek Elley, writing for the London Film Festival, was prophetic in his praise of Yellow Earth: "Chen Kaige's feature début shatters many of the inbuilt traditions of Chinese filmmaking, relying on imagery and song rather than incident and dialogue to propel the plot. Set amid the barren, dusty hills of northern Shaanxi province in the spring of 1939, the film tells of an Eighth Route Army soldier who arrives in a tradition-bound community to research folk songs. While there he becomes involved in the lives of three characters-an old man, his 14-year-old daughter (about to undergo an arranged marriage) and his younger son. Despite his vow that 'all of China must change', the soldier finds himself powerless to change an inevitable course of events. The dialogue is elliptical and compressed, the playing taciturn and unbending. But the effect is magical. Western viewers will recognize traces of Jancsó, Bresson and Soviet Asian cinema. If there is ever a Mainland Chinese New Wave to parallel that in Hongkong and Taiwan, Yellow Earth will be its foundation stone."