The Volunteers: The Battle of Life and Death (2024)

The Fifth Generation (第五代) are the Beijing Film Academy's landmark class of 1982 — the first cohort admitted after the Cultural Revolution, trained in a system that had been shuttered for over a decade. Their films rejected the socialist-realist tradition of earlier Communist-era cinema, replacing ideological didacticism with visually lush, allegorical work rooted in Chinese history, folk memory, and landscape. Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984), shot by Zhang Yimou as cinematographer, is considered the movement's founding text. Zhang Yimou (张艺谋, born 1950) became the most internationally celebrated Chinese filmmaker of his generation: Red Sorghum won the Golden Bear at Berlin (1988); Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, and To Live are among the great films of the 1990s. He later moved into wuxia spectacle (Hero, House of Flying Daggers) and directed both Beijing Olympics ceremonies (2008 and 2022). Chen Kaige (陈凯歌, born 1952) directed Farewell My Concubine (1993), the first Chinese film to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes — a sweeping epic about performance, identity, sexuality and loyalty across decades of Chinese history. Tian Zhuangzhuang (田壮壮, born 1952) represents the movement's most uncompromising pole: The Horse Thief (1986) and The Blue Kite (1993) pushed formal and political limits that neither colleague dared approach.