General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

In the Wild Mountains (野山)

In the Wild Mountains (野山; Ye shan) is a 1985 Chinese drama directed by Yan Xueshu (颜学恕) and produced by the Xi'an Film Studio, adapted from Jia Pingwa's novel Jiwowa renjia (鸡窝洼的人家, "The Households of Jiwowa"). Set in a remote village in the Qinling mountains of Shaanxi during the early 1980s rural economic reforms, it follows two farming couples whose marriages dissolve and recombine along lines of attitude toward change.¹^•² The film won Best Picture at the 6th Golden Rooster Awards in 1986 and the Montgolfière d'Or at the Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes.³^•¹

Key fact	Detail
Original title	野山 (Ye shan); international title In the Wild Mountains¹
Director / production	Yan Xueshu; Xi'an Film Studio¹
Source	Jia Pingwa's novel Jiwowa renjia (鸡窝洼的人家)²
Technical profile	1985, China, 105 minutes, Mandarin, color, 35 mm, 1.33:1¹^•⁴
Principal cast	Du Yuan, Yue Hong, Xin Ming, Xu Shouli¹
Major awards	Golden Rooster Best Story Film, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Sound (1986); Montgolfière d'Or, Nantes 1986³
Setting	Jiwowa, a mountain village in the Qinling range, Shaanxi, during the early-1980s economic reforms³

Spoilers

Story

Two households live in Jiwowa, a small mountain village deep in the Qinling range. Huihui is a contented traditional farmer whose household has enough food and clothing; his one dissatisfaction is that his wife Guilan cannot bear children. Hehe, a former soldier who has seen the outside world, keeps trying one venture after another to get rich: firing bricks, raising fish, raising silkworms, and selling tofu, all of which fail and exhaust the family's savings. His wife Qiurong, tired of the failures, leaves him and takes their son.⁴^•⁵

Guilan, lively and curious about the world beyond the mountains, enjoys listening to Hehe's stories and sympathizes with his ventures. After Hehe goes to the city to work odd jobs, Guilan follows him there, comes to understand his aspirations, and returns changed; Huihui beats her, and she leaves the village for good. Huihui and Qiurong then marry, as do Hehe and Guilan. Hehe brings machinery back to the village, including a walking tractor, a noodle-pressing machine, and a generator, shaking the isolated valley; Hehe and Guilan become the couple the villagers envy, while Huihui and Qiurong continue turning a mill by hand.⁴

The film was colloquially called a "story about swapping wives." Director Yan Xueshu acknowledged the plot's appeal but said he worked the conflicts into the characters' inner lives rather than external melodrama, dispersing the story into ordinary rural life.⁶ The Rotterdam festival program later described it as a husband-swapping drama structurally closer to comedy, in which each character searches for domestic solutions reflecting both economic and erotic aspirations.²

Production

After completing Silk Road Flower Rain in 1982, Yan Xueshu turned down historical epics offered by colleagues, deciding to devote himself to contemporary life and to make a film full of "Qin" flavor about the northwestern mountains. He chose Jia Pingwa's novel and spent nearly three months in the Shangluo mountains gathering material from village households. He made two major changes to the source: he added a sequence in which Hehe, crushed by the failure of his silkworm venture, returns at night to Qiurong's home hoping for reconciliation, and he deleted the novel's ending in which Huihui converts completely and rolls his stone mill into the ravine, removing what Yan saw as a schematic, artificial touch.⁶

Realist technique. Yan used only modeling makeup, no "beauty makeup," and devised a "mud makeup" method in which fine sifted dust was sprinkled on the actors so their faces and bodies looked permanently earth-covered, like farmers who roll in the fields all year. About 90 percent of the costumes were bought at local markets from farmers actually wearing them, since artificially aged clothing never looked convincing.⁶ The film was shot on location in Miliang township, Zhen'an County, Shaanxi.³

Sync sound. Location-synchronized sound covers 96 percent of the finished film's shots, a success rate the production notes describe as leading among Chinese films of the period. Yan argued that sync sound was true to life and captured voices and tones that post-synchronization could not reproduce, and that it pushed actors toward more truthful performances, since they reviewed each day's recordings and corrected deficiencies the next day.⁶

Reception and controversy

In April 1986 the jury of the 6th Golden Rooster Awards named In the Wild Mountains Best Story Film. The result drew high-level attention: a discussion was held in which leaders judged that the film diverged greatly from China's national character and did not accord with current rural reform policy, and the award announcement was held back for several months before publication.⁷ A newspaper of the time criticized the film on the grounds that it equated reform with "swapping wives," questioning Yan's motives and nearly costing it eligibility for the top prize.⁸

The awards ultimately went to the film in quantity: at the 6th Golden Rooster Awards it took Best Story Film, Best Director (Yan Xueshu), Best Actress (Yue Hong), Best Supporting Actor (Xin Ming), and Best Sound (Li Lanhua).³ At the 1986 Festival des 3 Continents in Nantes it won the Montgolfière d'Or.¹ It premiered in Canada on 11 September 1986, opened in West Germany in February 1987, and in the United States on 19 March 1987.³ IMDb records a user rating of 6.9/10 from 79 votes.⁹

Place in Chinese cinema

The film is counted among the landmark works of the "western film" (西部片) current that emerged from the Xi'an Film Studio in the mid-1980s, alongside Old Well and Red Sorghum. Critics place it beside Wu Tianming's Old Well as a defining treatment of rural transformation: two farm families in the northwest mountains, pushed by rural economic reform, split and recombine, portraying ordinary farmers' cultural psychology in a changing countryside with humor and depth.¹⁰ A survey of rural-themed Chinese cinema notes that the 1986 film addressed rural freedom of marriage, showing two couples in Jiwowa divorcing over differences in outlook during reform and each finding a like-minded new partner, a story critics called bold and fresh.¹¹

The film was screened in the Official Selection competition at the 1986 Festival des 3 Continents and returned there in 2003 in the retrospective "Chinese Cinema: from the Beginning to the 5th Generation"; it also played the 2008 International Film Festival Rotterdam in the "Rediscovering the 4th Generation" program.¹^•² A DVD edition with Chinese subtitles was issued for Chinese-language learners in the "Learn Chinese with Me / Chinese Classic Films" series.¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1980s › Released 1980 to 1985

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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