Xiao Wu

A low-budget production show with non-professional actors, this film follows its eponymous protagonist, a petty criminal, through the days and nights of his aimless existence in the province. Former friends who have made money in the non-transparent economic climate want nothing more to do with him; his girlfriend, who works in a karaoke bar, leaves him for another man; his father kicks him out. Caught red-handed by the police, he watches his own arrest on the news at the police station and sees how his social marginalization is depicted. An expressive and unadorned examination of the political and economic forces that shaped Chinese society in the 1990s, which premiered in the Berlinale’s International Forum section, curated by Arsenal, in 1998.