General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Postmen in the Mountains (那山、那人、那狗)

Postmen in the Mountains (那山、那人、那狗, "That Mountain, That Man, That Dog") is a 1999 Chinese drama film directed by Huo Jianqi, adapted from the short story of the same name by the Hunan writer Peng Jianming. It follows a retiring rural postman who walks his son through the family's mountain mail route one last time, and it became one of the most successful Chinese art films in Japan despite earning almost nothing in its home market.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	那山、那人、那狗 (Nashan naren nagou); English title Postmen in the Mountains¹
Release	1999, China; 93 minutes; Mandarin; color; 1.33:1 aspect ratio¹
Director and screenplay	Huo Jianqi; screenplay by Si Wu, based on Peng Jianming's short story¹^•²
Cast	Teng Rujun (the father), Liu Ye (the son), and Chen Hao in leading roles²
Production	Xiaoxiang Film Studio with Beijing Film Studio; filmed in summer 1998 in Suining County, Shaoyang, Hunan²^•³
Major awards	Golden Rooster Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor (19th edition, 1999); most popular film at the Montreal International Film Festival (1999); Special Jury Award, International Film Festival of India (2000)⁴^•⁵^•⁶
Box office contrast	Near-zero domestic earnings (480,000 yuan in TV and film-channel rights plus 80,000 US dollars overseas) against 350 million yen at a single Tokyo art house in 2001 and over 1 billion yen cumulative in Japan⁵^•⁷

Spoilers

Story

The film is set in the mountainous region of western Hunan in the 1980s. An aging postman who has spent his life delivering mail on foot is forced by poor health and chronic leg pain to retire, and his son takes over the route. Unwilling to let the young man start alone, the father joins him on the first round, a journey of three days and two nights over more than 75 miles of mountain paths, accompanied by the loyal German shepherd Laoer.²^•⁸

The two have never spent this much time together. The son hardly knows how to address his father, and the father can only talk about the job. Along the route, the warmth villagers show the old postman lets the son see his father's work in a new light, and the estrangement caused by years of absence dissolves. At a creek crossing, the son insists on carrying his father across on his back so the old man will never touch cold water again; the father, remembering when he once carried the boy, realizes he has grown old. The son finally calls out "Dad," and the father, who has worked in solitude all his life, feels the greatest satisfaction of his years.¹^•⁸ In the ending, the son continues the route alone with the mailbag while the father watches from a hilltop and the dog follows its new master into the morning mist.⁹

Production

The project began in early 1998, when the literary department of the Xiaoxiang studio proposed adapting Peng Jianming's short story as a single television drama. Huo Jianqi, after reading a few pages, judged that only a feature film could convey the story's slow, deep tone, and the studio agreed to fund a deliberately non-commercial film under tight financing, with support from studio head Kang Jianmin.¹⁰

Huo cast Liu Ye, then a second-year student at the Central Academy of Drama, and Chen Hao, both then unknown. The crew shot in Suining County, Shaoyang, in the summer of 1998, relying largely on natural light and shooting only on overcast days to preserve the layered greens of the subtropical forest; the long "dart gliding" shot was made without computer effects.⁷^•³^•¹⁰

Awards and reception

The film won Best Picture and, for Teng Rujun, Best Actor at the 19th Golden Rooster Awards in 1999, with Huo Jianqi nominated for Best Director and Si Wu for Best Screenplay; Teng also won Best Actor at the 6th Beijing College Student Film Festival.⁴^•³ Internationally it was named the most popular film at the 1999 Montreal International Film Festival and won the Special Jury Award at the International Film Festival of India in New Delhi in 2000, and it was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the 25th Japanese Academy Awards in 2002.⁵^•⁶^•³

When released abroad, critics responded to its restraint. Roger Ebert gave it 3 of 4 stars, writing that it was "so simple and straightforward that its buried emotions catch us a little by surprise."¹¹ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 96% Tomatometer from 24 reviews and a 93% audience score.¹¹

The Japanese phenomenon

Domestic distribution failed almost completely. Distributors judged the film too quiet and non-commercial to turn a profit, and it went straight to the movie channel; its entire domestic income was 480,000 yuan from domestic release and television rights plus 80,000 US dollars from overseas sales, of which 60,000 dollars came from the sale to Japan.⁵^•¹²

Japan reversed the film's fortunes. Released there in 2001 on the Iwanami Hall art-house circuit under the localized title "The Village Postman," it earned 350 million yen from a single screen, a Japanese single-theater record that exceeded the 280 million yen taken that year by the Hollywood release Planet of the Apes, and moved more than 200,000 viewers to tears according to Chinese press accounts. Cumulative Japanese box office later passed 1 billion yen, making it for a time the highest-grossing Chinese film in Japan.⁵^•¹³^•⁷ The Japanese distributor spent nearly a year on promotion, compiled exhaustive background material on the film, and Iwanami bought rights to six of Peng Jianming's short stories to publish a Japanese story collection that was reprinted five times at 10,000 copies each.¹⁴ The film's quiet tone and pastoral imagery were widely credited with matching Japanese audiences' taste, and the novel itself became a bestseller there.¹³^•¹⁵

The source novel

Peng Jianming's short story won a National Excellent Short Story Award in the early 1980s and draws on the experience of a friend from his home county of Pingjiang. The story runs to little more than 10,000 characters and gives its postman father and son no names, a design Peng described as clean and pure. Critics have read the tale as a fable of walking, life, and time, and it has been reprinted in dozens of student textbooks and anthologies.¹⁵^•¹⁶ Scholarly comparisons of the two versions note that the novel and the film differ in artistic expression and characterization while each succeeded in its own medium.¹⁷

Restoration and afterlife

A 4K restoration premiered at the China Film Archive in 2019 to an audience of more than 600, and the restored version screened at the 15th Beijing International Film Festival in April 2025, where nearly 600 tickets for two shows sold out on the day they went on sale. Huo Jianqi supervised the restoration personally, visiting the restoration team eight times to check color and detail against the 1998 original.¹⁸^•¹⁹^•²⁰ On Douban the film has drawn scores around 8.5 to 8.8 from audiences numbering over 150,000, and it is routinely described in Chinese media as a touchstone of Chinese poetic cinema.¹⁴^•¹⁶

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 1990s › Drama films late 1990s › Released in 1999

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

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