The Red Awn is a 2007 Chinese film

Cinema of China

The Chinese-language cinema has three distinct historical threads: Cinema of Hong Kong, Cinema of China, and Cinema of Taiwan. Since 1949 the cinema of mainland China has operated under restrictions imposed by the Communist Party of China's State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television and...

 directed Cai Shangjun

Cai Shangjun

Cai Shangjun is a Chinese film director and screenwriter. Cai graduated from the Central Academy of Drama in 1992. Since then, his major work has been that of a professional screenwriter. Cai was part of the team, along with Zhang Yang, Diao Yi'nan, and Liu Fendou, that co-wrote the screenplays...

. The film premiered at the 2007 Pusan International Film Festival

Pusan International Film Festival

Busan International Film Festival , held annually in Haeundae-gu, Busan , South Korea, is one of the most significant film festivals in Asia...

 where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. The film tells the story of a father and son in China's interior Gansu

Gansu

' is a province located in the northwest of the People's Republic of China.It lies between the Tibetan and Huangtu plateaus, and borders Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia to the north, Xinjiang and Qinghai to the west, Sichuan to the south, and Shaanxi to the east...

 province. It also won the Golden Alexander, the top award at the International Thessaloniki Film Festival.

Cast

• Yao Anlian as Song, a man who returns to his hometown after five years only to discover that his family has declared him dead.
• Lu Yulai as Yongtao, Song's 17-year old son.
• Shi Junhui as Yongshan, Song's friend and the owner of the titular (in the original Chinese) red combine harvester
  Combine harvester
  The combine harvester, or simply combine, is a machine that harvests grain crops. The name derives from the fact that it combines three separate operations, reaping, threshing, and winnowing, into a single process. Among the crops harvested with a combine are wheat, oats, rye, barley, corn ,...
  
  .
• Huang Lu
  Huang Lu
  Huang Lu is a Chinese actress. A graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, Huang debuted in director Li Yang's Blind Mountain, where she played a young college student sold into sexual slavery in a mountain village in central China....
  
  

Reception

The Red Awn found success on the international film festival circuit early on. Besides winning the FIPRESCI Prize at Pusan, The Red Awn also was an official selection of the 2007 International Thessaloniki Film Festival where it premiered on November 24, 2007. It went on to win the Golden Alexander, the Festival's top prize along with a €37,000 monetary award.

On November 11, 2008, the film won the Jury Grand Prize in the 2008 Asia Pacific Screen Awards

Asia Pacific Screen Awards

The Asia Pacific Screen Awards is an international cultural initiative of the State Government of Queensland, Australia, through Events Queensland, to honour and promote the films, actors, directors, and cultures of Asia-Pacific to a global audience and to realise the objectives of UNESCO to...

.

Awards and nominations

• 2007 International Thessaloniki Film Festival
  • Golden Alexander
• 2007 Pusan International Film Festival
  • FIPRESCI
    FIPRESCI
    The International Federation of Film Critics is an association of national organizations of professional film critics and film journalists from around the world for "the promotion and development of film culture and for the safeguarding of professional interests." It was founded in June 1930 in...
    
     Prize
• 2008 Asia Pacific Screen Awards
  • Jury Grand Prize (shared with The Prisoner)

External links

• The Red Awn at the Chinese Movie Database
• The Red Awn, a review from FIPRESCI
  FIPRESCI
  The International Federation of Film Critics is an association of national organizations of professional film critics and film journalists from around the world for "the promotion and development of film culture and for the safeguarding of professional interests." It was founded in June 1930 in...