General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Night Train (夜车)

Night Train (夜车; pinyin: Yè chē) is a 2007 Chinese drama film written and directed by Diao Yinan (刁亦男), starring Liu Dan as a female court bailiff and Qi Dao as the widower of a woman she escorted to execution. It premiered on 25 May 2007 at the 60th Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard competition and is Diao's second feature, following Uniform (2003).¹

Key fact	Detail
Premiere	25 May 2007, Cannes Film Festival, Un Certain Regard competition¹
Cast	Liu Dan as Wu Hongyan, Qi Dao as Li Jun²
Running time and language	94 minutes, Mandarin²
Awards	New Director and New Film awards, 23rd Warsaw International Film Festival (2007); Best Actress for Liu Dan, Buenos Aires festival (2008)¹
Distribution	MK2 Diffusion (France); also released as Train de nuit¹

Spoilers

Plot

Wu Hongyan (刘丹) is a bailiff for a provincial court in western China who supervises female death-row inmates, most of them convicted of crimes of passion. Her husband has died, she has been single for ten years, and her routine life consists of presenting evidence in court and escorting the condemned to their executions.¹^•³

Every weekend she takes a long train ride to the nearest city to attend the weekly dance of the Good Luck Matchmaking agency, where her encounters leave her feeling more alone.²^•⁴ There she meets the mysterious Li Jun (奇道), a widower, and the two are drawn to each other. She later discovers that his wife was one of the prisoners she escorted to execution; Li Jun, who blames her for his wife's death, has been following her with the intention of killing her. The knife that never draws blood is set aside, and the two lonely people come together.¹^•²

The Athens International Film Festival's program described the film as "a moving, evocatively shot elegy on human loneliness and isolation," with Wu's character serving as the foundation for a pessimistic portrait of modern China.⁴ The AFI FEST program placed the pair's inner conflicts and mutual desire as an allegory of China's struggles to adapt to disorienting societal change.³

Production

Diao Yinan graduated from the literature department of the Central Academy of Drama in 1992 and worked in theater and screenwriting before directing; his debut feature Uniform (2003) won the Dragons and Tigers Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival and a special mention at Rotterdam.⁵^•⁶

Shooting. Like Uniform, Night Train takes place in Diao's home province of Shaanxi and was shot in and around the city of Baoji. The production was able to use the local court and even local court staff to film a trial scene, and the cast included many non-professional actors, which the film's Chinese publicity said brought it closer to real life.⁷^•⁵ Locations included the Baoji Intermediate People's Court and the Hongguang iron factory of the Shaanxi Longgang Group.⁵

Financing and crew. Vivian Qu and Steve Chow produced; Dong Jinsong was the cinematographer, Kong Jinglei the editor, and Wen Zi the composer.²

Festival run and reception

It then screened in the "A Window on Asian Cinema" section of the 12th Pusan International Film Festival in October 2007.²^•⁵

At the 23rd Warsaw International Film Festival in October 2007 the film won both the New Director award for Diao Yinan and the New Film award.¹ Liu Dan won the Best Actress award at the 10th Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema in October 2008.¹ On Douban the film held a 7.4/10 rating from about 14,425 users.¹

Place in Diao Yinan's career

Night Train is the second of Diao's early features set in the depths of his native Shaanxi, between Uniform (2003) and the works that followed his international breakthrough, Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014) and The Wild Goose Lake (2019).⁸ In a 2019 interview with China Film News, Diao said that his concern with rain-soaked nights and characters thrown into the unknown, a hallmark of his later noir films, began with Night Train.⁹ The AFI FEST program placed him, on the strength of this film, among contemporary Asian directors alongside Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jia Zhangke.³

Other films titled 夜车

The Chinese title 夜车 has been used by several unrelated films:

The Happenings (夜車, 1980), a Hong Kong crime drama directed by Yim Ho (嚴浩), written by Yim Ho and Shu Kei, starring Cheung Kwok-kwong, Yim Chau-wah, and Danny Chan (陳百強). Produced by Golden Harvest, it was released in Hong Kong on 3 April 1980 with a 90-minute running time in Cantonese, and earned HK$2,462,703, ranking 30th for the year. It follows a group of idle teenagers whose joyride in a stolen sports car, which contains evidence of its owner's crimes, draws them into robbery, accidental killing, flight, and a collective death ending that critics have compared to the finale of Patrick Tam's Nomad (烈火青春, 1982).¹⁰^•¹¹
Night Train (夜车, 2023), an American action thriller directed by Shane Stanley, 96 minutes, starring Danielle Chuchran as a single mother who deals in black-market medical supplies from her pickup truck while evading an FBI agent.¹²
Night Bus (夜行猎车, 2019), a 54-minute Chinese genre experiment by director Miao, shown in the industry screening section of the FIRST International Film Festival, in which two actors trade five scary stories told during a night ride.¹³
A related title, Night Freight (夜行货车, 1985), directed by Xie Yuchen and adapted from Chen Yingzhen's novel of the same name, was released in Hong Kong in 1986.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Film noir and neo-noir films › Released 1977 to 2022

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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