"Actor: Tao Zhao"

• Still Life | DVD | (18/08/2008) from £8.66   |  Saving you £11.33 (130.83%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Set against the spectacular landscape of the Three Gorges region Jia Zhangke's humane and moving Golden-Lion winner tells two contemplative and compassionate stories of a man and woman searching for absent spouses in Fengjie - an ancient town on the Yangtze River which is being demolished and will soon vanish for ever in the flooding caused by the controversial Three Gorges hydroelectric dam project.

• The World | Blu Ray | (13/02/2012) from £18.88   |  Saving you £1.11 (5.88%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The fourth feature by internationally acclaimed auteur Jia Zhangke was also his breakout success, an epic with a canvas as vast, and intimate, as its title suggests: a state-of-the-modern-world address, and a look at the insular world of a troupe of Chinese stage-performers dreaming of freedom… Zhao Tao, Jia’s muse, is one of these troupers. For Tao and the larger ensemble of pageant performers at Beijing’s real-life World Park (a sprawling hyper-pastiche of global landmarks — “famous sites from five continents”), love is respite from work, work is respite from love, and the line that extends from the past to the future loses all definition beyond the present. A testament to the wisdom of this young filmmaker who arrived in the late 1990s with Xiao Wu and, in 2000, Platform (regarded by many to be the greatest film of the 2000s), Shijie / The World provides an image of globalisation as a paradox: at once a phenomenon rooted in social control, and a network that allows connection across individual people and populations. Special Dual Format Edition: 1080p Blu-Ray transfer English subtitles Tony Rayns on The World: New and exclusive video introduction to the film Made in China: A 65 minute documentary on the making of The World The World according to Jia Zhangke: A 24 minute interview 40 page booklet

• Shun Li & The Poet | DVD | (23/09/2013) from £8.98   |  Saving you £7.01 (43.80%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Shun Li works in a textile factory on the outskirts of Rome and hopes to get Italian citizenship so her eight-year-old son can join her in Italy. When she is suddenly transferred to Chioggia a small city-island in the Veneto lagoon to work as a bartender in a pub she meets Bepi a Slavic fisherman nicknamed 'the Poet' by his friends a regular at that pub for years and a writer of doggerel verse. Shun Li shares with Bepi stories of Qu Yuan China's most celebrated poet and the two strike up a friendship that has the potential to become something more. However the budding relationship is threatened by the objections of both the Chinese immigrant population and the local Italian fishing community.