General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Days (1991 film)

The Days (冬春的日子, Dongchun de rizi) is a 1993 Chinese independent black-and-white drama directed by Wang Xiaoshuai, his first feature film. It follows Xiaodong and Xiaochun, a young artist couple in Beijing whose relationship disintegrates as Xiaochun plans to emigrate to New York. The film was begun in 1991, shot in 1992, and screened at international festivals in 1993 and 1994; it was banned in China, where it became a founding work of the underground "Sixth Generation" of Chinese filmmakers.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Dongchun de rizi (冬春的日子); Mandarin dialogue, 35 mm black-and-white⁴^•⁵
Director	Wang Xiaoshuai, who wrote and directed his first feature at age 27 after graduating from the Beijing Film Academy in 1989⁶
Cast	Painters Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong, leading figures in the Chinese art world, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, with Lou Ye³^•⁷
Budget	Accounts differ: about $6,000 scraped together by Wang and friends, US$7,000, $10,000 raised among friends, and US$77,000 have all been reported⁸^•⁹^•¹⁰^•³
Runtime	Festival catalogs list 75 minutes, 80 minutes, and 1h 20m for different editions⁵^•¹⁰^•¹¹
Censorship	Blacklisted by the Chinese Film Bureau; distribution banned in China and Wang initially barred from directing again³^•⁶
Festival life	Screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Melbourne International Film Festival in 1994, among others⁵^•³

Spoilers

Story and cast

The film traces the last days of a deteriorating relationship between two young artists in Beijing.⁶ Xiaodong and Xiaochun studied painting at a Beijing art school, stayed on as tutors after graduation, and made a little money selling their paintings. Life becomes monotonous; both know the relationship is ending but neither wants to talk about it. Xiaochun secretly arranges to emigrate to New York. When Xiaodong discovers the plans, he asks no questions. Xiaochun tells him she is pregnant, he suggests an abortion, and she accepts. After a quiet vacation in the countryside they return to the city, where Xiaochun remains determined to leave and Xiaodong is heartbroken.⁴ As a final attempt to rescue the marriage, the couple travels to the town where the husband grew up, and there his wife delivers information he would rather not receive.³

The leads were not professional actors. Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong are celebrated contemporary painters who were, like the characters, a couple; Lou Ye, later a director himself, also appears.³^•⁷ Wang, who studied painting himself like the character Dong, later said that shooting the film "was just like writing in our diaries."¹³

Production

Wang Xiaoshuai graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1989, when China's film industry still operated under a planned economy in which only a few state-owned studios could make movies. Assigned to a provincial studio in Fujian, he quit and returned to Beijing to make films independently.¹^•⁸ In 1991 he set out to make his debut feature, realizing that a large-budget film was impossible and turning to small-scale independent production.²

The production was improvised with friends. Wang and his collaborators scraped together money, borrowed a camera, and persuaded a company to give them film stock for free.⁸ Filmmaker Jia Zhangke recounted that Wang climbed onto a freight train bound for Baoding in Hebei province to buy cheap black-and-white film stock.¹² Crew photographs show Wang and his team shooting the film in Beijing in 1992; Wang has said the whole process, production time included, took about two or three months.¹ Budget figures vary widely across accounts: the New York Times reported about $6,000, a Brisbane festival note gave US$7,000, the San Francisco and Busan festivals described $10,000 raised among friends, and the Melbourne festival catalog printed US$77,000.⁸^•⁹^•¹⁰^•³

The film was produced outside the state studio system with private funds, and the credits list Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Hongtao as producers, Liu Jie and Wu Di as cinematographers, Qingqing as editor, and Liang Heping as composer. Shu Kei's Creative Workshop is credited as producer of the festival print, with Fortissimo Films as world sales agent.⁴^•⁵^•⁷

Style

The film is shot in black and white with a mild gray main tone rather than dramatic contrast, a look the scholar Wu Liu attributes partly to the old camera and printing process. The mood of helpless desperation is carried by steady long shots forming a slow rhythm, and by the setting: most of the film takes place in a narrow room that reflects the protagonists' isolated life, while the open space of the hometown visit arrives at the moment their separation becomes inevitable, its brightness serving as a foil to the sadness.¹³ Critics noted the stark visuals, elliptical narrative, and taciturn performances; Time Out called the result "a hauntingly poetic elegy to the transience of love."¹⁴ The Dutch review in Filmkrant singled out the use of Miles Davis's jazz under the melancholy wordless scenes, and a sardonic voice-over that comments on the action.¹⁵ That voice-over became a Wang Xiaoshuai trademark, reappearing in his second independent feature Frozen and his first legally approved film So Close to Paradise.⁹

Censorship and reception

Made outside the state system, The Days was blacklisted by the Chinese Film Bureau upon release; the Cannes festival biography records that, though acclaimed by Western critics, it was placed on a blacklist banning its distribution in China.²^•⁶ The Melbourne festival reported that the authorities banned the film and decreed that Wang was never to direct again, one apparent reason being that the film contradicted the official picture of China as a booming economy of happy consumers by centering on struggling artists.³ Like other independent films of the period, it was forbidden in commercial theaters and legal physical distribution in China, reaching domestic viewers mainly through bootleg VCDs and DVDs.¹⁶

The ban extended abroad. In 1994, while Wang, Zhang Yuan, He Jianjun, and several documentarians attended the Rotterdam Film Festival, an urgent facsimile arrived from the Film Bureau insisting on the immediate cancellation of the planned projections of their films, on the grounds that the works had not been approved by the censorship office.¹⁷ Despite this, the film circulated widely on the festival circuit: it showed at Rotterdam in 1994, at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1994, at the Melbourne International Film Festival in 1994, and in European festivals from 1994.⁵^•¹⁰^•³^•⁸ A limited theatrical release followed in the United States on February 19, 1994, distributed by International Film Circuit.¹¹

Place in Chinese cinema

Together with Zhang Yuan's Beijing Bastards (1993), Wang's film is counted among the early works that established underground, independent fiction filmmaking in mainland China, produced outside the state studio system and its ideological censorship and focused on marginal figures in contemporary China rather than the historical allegories of the Fifth Generation directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou.¹⁸ Wang himself described the film as presenting "the truth about the lives of people from my generation in the wake of the Tiananmen Square tragedy," a conscious rebellion against the lavish Fifth Generation films he found "unnatural and pretentious."² Writing a decade after release, the Brisbane festival noted that The Days had become "a touchstone for a certain moment in Beijing social history and a marker for a key moment in Chinese film history," and observed that by making it Wang had demonstrated it was possible to live and work as an artist outside the mechanisms of the state.⁹^•³ Wang went on to a leading career in the Sixth Generation, with Beijing Bicycle winning the Grand Jury Silver Bear at Berlin in 2001, though censorship continued to shadow his work.⁶^•¹

References

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