Cheng Cong, the matriarch of a wealthy Shanghainese family in Hong Kong, is financing the production of a new play in Hong Kong's venerable City Hall. The play is Two Sisters, a retro melodrama in the vein of Tennessee Williams, written and directed by the trans woman Ouyang An. As the two sisters of the title, the production will star Yuan Xiuling (a stage veteran making a comeback five years after retiring from the theatre, and one year after the death of her faithless husband Cheng Jun - who was Cheng Cong's younger brother) and He Yuwen (a smart movie actress making her stage debut, who happens to have nursed a career-long rivalry with her co-star). The production is scheduled to have its first night in one week's time. The run-up to the first night is eventful. Yuan Xiuling has been left financially embarrassed by her late husband's apparent failure to provide for her, and worries where she will live and how she will pay for her son Yuan's boarding-school fees in England. She has.
'We're waiting to grow old'. This sentence briefly sums up Yaoyun and his wife Liyun's bitter realization about their lives. They were once a happy family - until their son drowned playing by a reservoir. And so Yaojun and Liyun leave their home and plunge into the big city, although nobody knows them there and they cannot even understand the local dialect. Their adopted son Liu Xing does not offer them the comfort they had hoped for either. Defiantly rejecting his 'foreign' parents, he one day disappears altogether. The married couple are repeatedly enmeshed in their memories. Finally, they decide to return to the site of their lost hopes. In this family saga spanning three decades of Chinese history, the private and the political merge and the individual gets caught up in the gears of a society in the throes of constant change. Part melodrama, part critique of the times, this film takes us from the country's upheaval in the 1980s following the Cultural Revolution to the prospering.
Following a fatal accident, a Chinese expatriate working for a mining company in Australia discovers that new technology developed by the company may be a health risk, and investigates a web of conspiracies in his search for the truth.
Luo Hongwu returns to Kaili, the hometown from which he fled 12 years earlier. As memories of an enigmatic and beautiful woman resurface - a woman he loved and whom he has never been able to forget - Luo Hongwu begins his search for her. Past and present, reality and dream interweave in Bi Gan's stunningly beautiful and highly innovative film noir.