General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Devils on the Doorstep (鬼子来了)

Devils on the Doorstep (鬼子来了) is a 2000 Chinese black-and-white comedy-drama directed by Jiang Wen, adapted from the novelist You Fengwei's story Survival (《生存》), about villagers in occupied Hebei who are forced to keep a Japanese soldier and a Chinese interpreter, leading to their deaths at the hands of the Japanese military¹^•²⁰. It won the Grand Prix at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival but has never been approved for public release in mainland China, because Jiang Wen submitted it to Cannes without first passing domestic censorship²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Director and lead	Jiang Wen, his second feature film; he also plays the villager Ma Dasan⁴^•⁵
Source	Adapted from You Fengwei's novel Survival (《生存》)¹
Setting	A village in northern Hebei province during the last winter of World War II, shot in black-and-white Cinemascope⁴
Cannes 2000	Grand Prix (jury prize) at the 53rd Cannes Film Festival²
Other honors	Hawaii International Film Festival Netpac award; Japan's Mainichi Film Award for best foreign film⁶
Runtime	2 hours 42 minutes per Rotten Tomatoes; the Cannes version is described as 162 minutes, and the IFFR catalog lists 166 minutes⁷^•⁸^•⁹
Status in China	Banned; Jiang Wen was barred from directing for five years after sending the film to Cannes without approval³

Spoilers

Plot

The story takes place in Guajitai (挂甲台), a village under Japanese occupation in Hebei at the end of the war¹. One night, guerrillas kidnap the Japanese army soldier Kosaburo Hanaya (花屋小三郎) and the interpreter Dong Hanchen (董汉臣), bind them, stuff them into sacks, and leave them at the house of the peasant Ma Dasan, ordering him to keep them safe until the men come to collect them on New Year's Eve³.

Ma Dasan is terrified but dares not refuse. He repeatedly tries to get rid of the two prisoners, hesitates out of fear, and ends up hiding and feeding them for half a year, a situation that leads to tragedy for him and the whole village¹. The villagers trade the prisoners back to the Japanese army for grain, and the arrangement ends in a massacre. In the aftermath, Ma Dasan is executed by beheading on the order of a Nationalist officer for killing surrendered Japanese soldiers¹⁰.

The prisoner Hanaya changes over the course of the story: the fierce soldier who at first wants to die for the emperor becomes, after months in the villagers' care, a man who wants only to live¹⁰.

Interpretation

Chinese scholars have read the film as a departure from the standard war narrative. A 2005 study in the Journal of Hainan Normal University described it as stripping away political embellishment to reconstruct a version of historical truth, examining the real condition of the "silent majority" in wartime, and probing the national characters of both China and Japan¹⁵. Another 2005 article called it a film of extraordinary content and multiple interpretations, tracing its meaning to the Lu Xun tradition of critique of national character and describing its fate as an instance of the tension between an author's management of meaning and society's reading¹⁶. A film historian's 2014 lecture at Renmin University argued that the ban showed that in China artistic truthfulness must submit to ideology, rooted in the struggle between the "praise" and "exposure" lines¹⁷.

The film's place in Jiang Wen's career has also been framed by the ban itself. The screenwriter Shu Ping told him, "You closed the door of twentieth-century Chinese film with Devils on the Doorstep"¹⁸, and Jiang Wen has recounted a comment that, after making the film, he walked the same path as his character Ma Dasan in early twenty-first-century China, having taken on two sacks and brought down a pile of trouble on himself¹⁹.

Cast and production

Jiang Wen plays Ma Dasan; Jiang Hongbo (姜鸿波) plays Yu'er (鱼儿), Teruyuki Kagawa (香川照之) plays the Japanese soldier Kosaburo Hanaya, and Ding Yuan plays the translator Dong Hanchen⁵. The credited screenwriters are You Fengwei, Shi Jianquan, Shu Ping, and Jiang Wen, and the music is by the rock musician Cui Jian⁷^•⁵.

The production was large for its subject: Jiang Wen said the film had more than 20 named roles and used over 500,000 feet of film, with Japanese actors requiring translation and mediation¹¹. Jiang Hongbo said she spent roughly two years on the role, from experiencing village life to revising dialogue and shooting, and that Yu'er remained her signature part¹². The film also cast two veteran actors from older Chinese anti-Japanese war films, Chen Qiang and Chen Shu, in cameo roles⁶.

Censorship and ban

The film was completed in 1998 as a co-production. The Film Bureau issued several revision opinions on the script, but Jiang Wen sent the film to Cannes before receiving approval, and after returning with the Grand Prix he did not resubmit it¹².

The Film Censorship Committee's written opinion, later published, states that the film failed to follow the approved project's revision requirements, was shot without a filed script, and added dialogue and scenes without authorization. It objected that the film did not show Chinese villagers' hatred of and resistance to the invaders, noting that the only character who dared curse and resist the Japanese army was a madman the villagers found annoying, and that the film instead highlighted the villagers' ignorance, numbness, and servility. It also objected that the film did not fully expose Japanese militarism but instead emphasized the invaders' swagger, and cited vulgar language, repeated use of the slur "支那猪" in the mouths of Japanese soldiers, and female nudity as failing the censorship standard¹³.

In 2002, a report quoted the film bureau chief as saying the film was being revised and could be released once fixed, but Jiang Wen said he had received no revision notice; the producer Dong Ping said the film objectively reflected the Japanese invasion and Chinese behavior at the time, and that the filmmakers and authorities needed to find common ground¹⁴. A 2004 report on a renewed submission found that the film bureau's arts office said it knew nothing of the submission or of whether the film had ever passed censorship¹². The film remains banned in mainland China³.

Release and reception abroad

The film premiered at Cannes in May 2000, where it shared the festival's honors with two other Chinese-language films: Yang Dechang's Yi Yi won best director and Tony Leung won best actor for In the Mood for Love⁶. It was released in Japan on April 27, 2002, where rumors that it could not be shown proved false and it received considerable praise⁶.

Western critics received it well. Rotten Tomatoes records a 92% Tomatometer from 12 reviews and a 95% audience score⁷. Stephen Holden of The New York Times compared its message to Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains and Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land; the Village Voice noted its rich, shadowy black-and-white photography and its ironic chronicle of reluctant captors and befuddled captives⁷.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released since 2000 › Released 2000 to 2016

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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