General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Drummer (战鼓)

The Drummer (戰．鼓) is a 2007 crime-drama film directed by Kenneth Bi (畢國智) in which a rebellious Hong Kong gangster's son, exiled to the mountains of Taiwan, joins a troupe of Zen drummers and is transformed by their discipline.¹ It is a Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Germany co-production, and its distributor describes it as the first feature film to combine the art of Chinese Zen drumming with a dramatic story.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Kenneth Bi, his second feature after Rice Rhapsody (2005)⁴
Production	Hong Kong, Taiwan, Germany, 2007; in Mandarin and Cantonese²^•⁵
Lead cast	Jaycee Chan (房祖名) as Sid, Tony Leung Ka-fai as the triad boss Kwan, with Angelica Lee, Kenneth Tsang, Roy Cheung, and Josie Ho¹^•³
Real drummers	The members of the Taiwanese troupe U Theatre (優人神鼓) play themselves or fictional versions of themselves⁶
World premiere	Locarno International Film Festival, 9 August 2007, screened in the Piazza Grande before an audience of almost 8,000⁷^•⁶
Golden Horse Awards 2007	Tony Leung Ka-fai won Best Supporting Actor; the film was nominated for Outstanding Taiwanese Film of the Year³
Hong Kong Film Awards 2008	Nominations for Best Original Film Score (Andre Matthias) and Best Sound Effects (Tu Duu-chih, Kuo Li-chi)³

Spoilers

Story

Sid (Jaycee Chan) is a drummer in a Hong Kong rock band and the son of the triad chieftain Kwan (Tony Leung Ka-fai). He gets into serious trouble by sleeping with the young mistress of the powerful underworld tycoon Stephen Ma (Kenneth Tsang). When the affair is discovered, Ma demands the boy's severed hands as retribution; Kwan negotiates the demand down and secretly sends Sid to hide in the Taiwanese countryside with a trusted aide, far from Ma's reach.¹^•⁴

Bored in hiding, Sid roams the mountainside and stumbles on the retreat of a Zen drumming troupe. Having played in beat groups in the city, he assumes he can join at once and is surprised to be kept at arm's length; he must pass tests before being accepted as an apprentice, and learns that drumming requires far more than hitting a drum with a stick.¹ He gradually wins over the group, with the exception of one suspicious young drummer (Angelica Lee), and the solitude and meditation begin to turn him from a bellicose troublemaker into an introspective adult facing his responsibilities.⁴ Meanwhile Kwan is betrayed by former associates and sent to prison for a substantial stretch, and the correspondence between father and son takes on new weight; in one scene Sid drums outside the cell where his father is held.⁴^•⁸

The Zen drummers

The film grew out of director Kenneth Bi's encounter with the Taiwanese troupe U Theatre, whose performances combine Tai Chi, martial arts, drumming, and meditation to maintain an inner peace that the drummers believe they can communicate to an audience during performance.⁷ Bi insisted that the real drummers appear as themselves or as fictional versions of themselves, because, in his words, no one else can play them.⁶ The troupe's Zen belief that nothing, including drumming, allows shortcuts shapes the apprenticeship plot.⁹

The film frames the drum through a bodily analogy: the first sound a fetus hears is the drum-like beat of the mother's heartbeat, and the narration equates the drum's beat with a heartbeat, with the line "drumsticks up, the heart flutters; drumsticks down, the mind awakens."⁷^•⁹ The critic Leo Soesanto read the film as stretching the kinship between kung-fu films and musicals, replacing martial-arts choreography with drumming rhythm as a metaphor for the speed of life and for love.¹⁰

Production

Kenneth Bi came to the project after Rice Rhapsody (2005); he set The Drummer aside for about a year while making that film and rewrote much of the script on his return, drawing on what he had learned.⁶ He had won Best New Director at the 2006 Hong Kong Film Awards for Rice Rhapsody, and The Drummer was made with financing from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Germany, with support from the Taiwanese film figure Peggy Chiao.⁸ The producers were Albert Lee, Peggy Chiao, Rosa Li, and Thanassis Karathanos, the Berlin-based co-producer whose company received support from the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, the fund's first backing for a Chinese film.⁴^•⁷

The German co-production side shaped the score. The German composer Andre Matthias wrote the music, working from the contrast between Sid's rebellious nature and the drummers' steady, serene life rather than from finished scenes, and the Hong Kong cellist Trey Lee, winner of the 2004 International Antonio Janigro Cello Competition, played the main instrument.⁷ Sam Koa's cinematography juxtaposes the dense cityscape of Hong Kong with the green mountains of Taiwan.⁴

Release and reception

The film premiered at Locarno on 9 August 2007 and played in competition at festivals including the Hawaii International Film Festival, Tokyo Filmex, and the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.⁷^•³ Dan Fainaru, reviewing in Screen at Locarno, called it a pleasant if not terribly original entertainment carried by spectacular drumming performances and the landscapes in which most of it takes place, and judged that its hesitation among several paths would limit its appeal to a respectable home-market career and limited festival dates abroad.¹ A later Far East Films review rated it 4.0 out of 5 and credited Jaycee Chan with one of his better performances, flanked by Tony Leung Ka-fai's "scenery-chewing" gangster and Kenneth Tsang.⁴ At the 44th Golden Horse Awards in 2007, Tony Leung Ka-fai won Best Supporting Actor for the film.³

Reported running times differ by source and version: Screen lists 115 minutes for the festival print,¹ the Swiss release listing gives 118 minutes,² and a Chinese DVD edition runs 98 minutes.¹¹

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 2000s › Sports and music drama films 2000s

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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