General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Continent (后会无期)

The Continent (后会无期) is a 2014 Chinese road film directed and written by Han Han, the best-selling writer, blogger, and professional rally driver, as his feature directorial debut¹^•². It follows three young men who leave a small island off China's eastern coast and drive across the country, meeting a series of strangers who reshape or end each stage of their journey¹. Released in mainland China on July 24, 2014, the film earned 629 million yuan by early September and became one of the year's most discussed Chinese releases, in part because it opened a week after Tiny Times 3, the film by Han Han's literary rival Guo Jingming¹^•³^•⁴.

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Han Han, in his feature directorial debut¹
Release	July 24, 2014 (mainland China); 104 minutes; Mandarin, sign language, and Cantonese¹
Main cast	Feng Shaofeng (Ma Haohan), Chen Bolin (Jiang He), Gao Huayang (Hu Sheng), Wallace Chung, Wang Luodan, Joe Chen, Yuan Quan, with Jia Zhangke in a cameo¹
Premise	Three friends leave Dongji Island, a fictional island presented as one of the easternmost points of China; Haohan drives Jiang He more than 3,000 km to his new teaching post in western China¹
Box office	Opening day 74.6 million yuan; 513 million yuan in 11 days; 629 million yuan cumulative by September 7, 2014³
Music	Score by Japanese producer Kobayashi Takeshi; Pu Shu's ending song "The Ordinary Road" (平凡之路) won Best Original Film Song at the 51st Golden Horse Awards⁵
Festival showings	Busan International Film Festival (2014); Osaka Asian Film Festival 2015, Japan premiere; Udine Far East Film 2015, European premiere⁶

Spoilers

Story and characters

The story begins on Dongji Island (东极岛), a fictional island presented as one of the easternmost points of China, where the sun is first seen¹^•². Hu Sheng (Gao Huayang), a simple-minded young man, narrates the story of his two friends: Ma Haohan (Feng Shaofeng), who returned home after years away to find the island facing demolition, and Jiang He (Chen Bolin), the island's only teacher, who has been reassigned to a remote post¹. Haohan decides to drive Jiang He to his new school more than 3,000 kilometers away, and the three set out together¹.

On the road the travelers meet a string of figures who each end a phase of the trip: Zhou Mo (Joe Chen), a childhood friend now working as an extra; Su Mi (Wang Luodan), a woman traveling with a gang posing as prostitutes; Liu Yingying (Yuan Quan), the pen pal Haohan has admired for years without ever meeting; and A Lü (Wallace Chung), an outspoken motorcyclist and thief with idealist talk¹^•⁷. Hu Sheng is lost early in the journey, and the film closes after four farewells, with Haohan and Jiang He arriving at the end of the road and taking different paths in life¹^•⁷.

No locations along the route are named in the film. The reviewer Derek Elley, who writes on Chinese cinema for Sino-Cinema, noted that the journey is avowedly metaphorical, moving from China's easternmost island to a place on the remote western border, with the people encountered mattering more than the geography².

Production

Han Han had planned a film for four or five years before announcing the project on Weibo in early 2014⁸. Producer Fang Li, head of Beijing-based Laurel Films, whose earlier credits include Summer Palace (2006), Lost in Beijing (2007), and Buddha Mountain (2010), chose the project from three stories Han Han pitched in May 2013; he and the publisher Lu Jinbo settled on the second story in a single night's discussion²^•⁹.

The shoot began on February 8, 2014, and wrapped at the end of May, with post-production completed in about a month so the film could reach theaters on July 24¹⁰^•⁴. Han Han said he compressed the schedule partly to return to his racing season and partly because he was confident in the workflow, which he described as close to American television production methods⁴.

Much of the film was shot in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southern Sichuan province and in Inner Mongolia, with early scenes in Zhejiang province near Ningbo and one stop filmed at Shanghai Film Park south of Shanghai². Cinematography is by Liao Ni and editing by Xiao Yang¹¹. Because Han Han disliked post-production dubbing, he kept Wallace Chung's Cantonese accent and wrote the character's line that he had come from Dongguan¹².

The score was composed by Kobayashi Takeshi, the Japanese producer known for his work in J-pop, in his first collaboration with a Chinese film; because the tight schedule did not allow him to see a finished cut, the music was composed in parallel with shooting, and Fang Li took him to Inner Mongolia, Dongji Island, Shanghai, and Beijing so he could experience the landscapes himself¹³. Pu Shu came out of a decade of quiet to record the ending theme "The Ordinary Road" (平凡之路), which won Best Original Film Song at the 51st Golden Horse Awards in 2014⁵^•⁸.

Box office and the rivalry with Tiny Times 3

The film opened on July 24, 2014, one week after Guo Jingming's Tiny Times 3 (July 17), and the two films' proximity turned a long-running literary rivalry into a box-office contest covered widely in the Chinese press⁴. On its first day The Continent took 36.86% of national screenings, about 33,062 showings, and earned 74.6 million yuan, including 4.1 million from midnight screenings³. Its first weekend brought in 285 million yuan⁴. By its eleventh day the cumulative total reached 513 million yuan, passing Tiny Times 3, and the total stood at 629 million yuan by September 7, 2014³^•¹⁴.

Xinhua reported the film as the previous week's box-office champion with 300 million yuan from Thursday to Sunday, and cited it as evidence that Chinese-language genre films, including road movies, had become competitive at the domestic box office¹⁵.

Reception

Chinese critics were divided. A China News Service review scored the plot 6.5 out of 10, calling the film so literary that it had almost no story, while praising the desolate visual tone, the score, and Pu Shu's theme song⁷. The critic Han Haoyue, writing in People's Daily Online's culture channel, argued that the film's joke-based humor, continuing Han Han's blog-era writing style, gave the film its entertainment value while submerging its theme¹⁶. A Shenyang Daily commentary criticized the four road episodes as loosely connected segments and the abandoned character threads¹⁷. Derek Elley rated it 7/10, calling it an interesting debut carried by its cast, dry humor, and widescreen photography, while judging its philosophical content thin for its ambitions².

Overseas response was similarly mixed. The film screened in the A Window on Asian Cinema section at the 2014 Busan International Film Festival, whose program described it as a nostalgic young road movie by "the leader of the Chinese Eighth Generation"¹⁸. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a Tomatometer score of 52% from fewer than 50 critic ratings¹⁹.

Themes

Han Han said the film's theme is farewell (告别)²⁰. Reviewers read the journey as a portrait of China's post-1980s generation: Derek Elley placed Han Han among the main spokesmen of the so-called "'80s generation" that grew up in reform-era, one-child-policy China without direct experience of the revolutionary past². Writing in The New Republic, the critic framed the film as a more nuanced portrayal of what it is like to be young and ambitious in China, centered on characters who could be called wenyi qingnian, roughly "artsy young people," for whom the economic boom is a dubious promise rather than a ticket to the top²¹. Han Han himself resisted grand readings, saying at a press conference that it is just a road movie²¹.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2013 to 2014 › Titles symbols to I

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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