General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Old Well (老井)

Old Well (老井) is a 1987 Chinese drama film directed by Wu Tianming, produced by Xi'an Film Studio, and adapted by the writer Zheng Yi from his own novel. Set in a waterless village in the Taihang Mountains, it follows the young villager Sun Wangquan, who leads his community's generations-long struggle to dig a working well, and it is remembered as the film in which the cinematographer Zhang Yimou made his debut as a leading actor and won the Tokyo International Film Festival's best actor award.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Wu Tianming; screenplay by Zheng Yi from his novel Lao Jing¹
Production	Xi'an Film Studio; filmed 1986, released 1987; 130 minutes, Mandarin, color³^•⁴
Lead cast	Zhang Yimou as Sun Wangquan, Liang Yujin as Zhao Qiaoying, Lu Liping as Duan Xifeng, Niu Xingli²
Cinematography	Chen Wancai and Zhang Yimou²
Tokyo honors	Grand Prix (best film), best actor (Zhang Yimou), and FIPRESCI special award at the 2nd Tokyo International Film Festival, 1987⁵
Chinese awards	1988 Golden Rooster for best picture, director, screenplay, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, and editing; 1988 Hundred Flowers best picture⁶
Real setting	Filmed in Shiyujiao village, Gua'er town, Zuoquan county, Shanxi, later renamed "Laojing village" after the film⁷

Spoilers

Story

The film is set in Old Well Village on the arid Loess Plateau, where generations of villagers have dug for water without success. In the film's synopsis, the villagers have sunk 125 wells, one of them 50 meters deep, and none has produced water.⁸ The aging villagers place their hopes in the young.¹

Sun Wangquan, a young man who has returned to the village after failing the college entrance examination, loves Zhao Qiaoying, but his family pressures him to marry into the household of the young widow Duan Xifeng as a live-in son-in-law, because her family can provide the money needed to find brides for his brothers.²^•⁹ Qiaoying and Sun plan to flee together, but the plan collapses when Sun's father is killed by an explosion while digging a well, and Sun submits to the arranged marriage.¹^•⁹

The scientific well. Sun turns his energy to well-digging. With the encouragement of a chief engineer from the water conservancy bureau, he studies geology in the county town, and on his return the young villagers search for a drilling site. The village's first well located by scientific survey finally breaks ground.⁹ During the digging a landslide traps Sun, Qiaoying, and Sun's brother Wangcai underground; the two lovers, facing possible death, consummate their relationship before being rescued, but Wangcai dies.⁹^•¹ With no funding for a new attempt, the villagers donate what they have: the elder Wanshui gives his coffin, Xifeng her sewing machine, and Qiaoying her dowry furniture, until the money is raised and the well finally strikes water.⁹ The film closes on a stone stele, the "Record of Old Well Village's Well-Digging History," inscribed with the words "renowned for a thousand ages" and the names of villagers who died digging wells from the Qing dynasty to the story's 1984 present.¹⁰

Production

Wu Tianming, born in 1939, had joined the Xi'an Film Studio actors' training class in 1960 and later studied under the director Cui Wei; by the time he encountered Zheng Yi's novel in the magazine Dangdai in the spring of 1985, he was the studio's head.¹¹ He asked Zheng Yi to adapt it, was unsatisfied with the first script, and took his creative team to the novel's prototype village, where a neighbor's account of an old man who spilled a full carrying-pole of water on New Year's Eve and wept on the ground for over an hour gave him a decisive shock; after more than 40 days of revision the script was finished.¹¹

Casting Zhang Yimou. Wu wanted a lead with the weathered look of Taihang mountain farmers, whose faces, he said, looked like stone carved by knives, and a two-month search across Shanxi's counties and theater troupes found no one. He finally cast Zhang Yimou, then a photographer who had shot Yellow Earth and One and Eight, telling his scouts to look for someone built like Zhang himself, "like a terracotta warrior dug out of the ground." The choice was opposed within the studio, since Zhang had no screen experience, but Wu reasoned that Zhang had rural labor experience and a persistent streak.¹¹^•¹² Zhang served simultaneously as co-director of photography with Chen Wancai and as the leading actor.²

The crew lived for a month in the real village to absorb local life, and the production followed Wu's principle of reflecting life truthfully, from location work to covert shooting.¹³^•¹¹ The filming location, Shiyujiao village in Zuoquan county, had about 80 households and some 300 people at the time, short of both water and iodine, and had sunk 151 wells in 30 years, all of which ran dry; its real dry holes supplied the film's imagery of failure.⁷

Reception and awards

At the 2nd Tokyo International Film Festival in 1987 the film won the Grand Prix as best film, Zhang Yimou won the best actor award, and the film took the international film critics' (FIPRESCI) special award; it also received the jury special award at the 7th Hawaii International Film Festival.⁵^•⁴ In 1988 it won the Golden Rooster for best picture, with further Golden Roosters for Wu's direction, Zheng Yi's screenplay, Zhang's performance, the supporting actors Niu Xingli and Xie Yan, the supporting actress Lu Liping, and Chen Dali's editing, as well as the 11th Hundred Flowers Award for best picture.⁶

Critics have read the film as a parable of a people's persistence. The critic Zhao Tong argued that the closing stele, tracing the village's well-digging from the Qing dynasty to 1984, links the village's struggle for water to the ancient Chinese tradition of "taming the waters," and that the film's power comes from retelling a continuing national story.¹⁰ The scholar Huang Shixian places Old Well as the final panel of Wu's western-rural trilogy, after River Without Buoys (1983) and Life (1984), and describes it as an epic of a poor mountain village determined to change its fate, in which the well is both a real structure of stone and a symbol built of human flesh and ideals.¹⁴ The film is also counted among the "western films" movement that took shape at Xi'an Film Studio in the mid-1980s after the critic Zhong Dianfei's 1984 call for a new Chinese cinema rooted in the northwest.¹⁴

Legacy

The film changed its filming location. Shiyujiao village became famous because of the production and was renamed "Laojing village," and the name came to stand for Shanxi's severe water shortage.⁷ In 2005, when Wu Tianming received a lifetime achievement award from the China Film Directors' Guild, he donated the entire 100,000-yuan prize to the village, saying that the village's dry wells, spaced every five or six meters, had given him the film's inspiration.⁷ After Wu's death in 2014, the 28th Tokyo International Film Festival screened a restored Old Well in its masters' classics section in his memory.¹⁵ The China Film Archive has since restored the film in 4K.¹

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 1986 to 1989

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

Notice something wrong?