General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Other Half

The Other Half (另一半; also romanized Ling yi ban) is a 2006 Chinese independent fiction film directed by Ying Liang, running 111 minutes and shot on DV in the Sichuan dialect¹^•². It is Ying's second feature, following his debut Taking Father Home (2005), and it won the Special Jury Prize at its world premiere at the Tokyo FilmEx festival in late 2006¹. The title refers both to a partner who completes a life and, in the film's structure, to the half of society erased from direct representation³. It should not be confused with other films of the same English title, including a 2006 British honeymoon comedy and a 2019 Chinese feature⁴^•⁵.

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Ying Liang, 2006; his second feature after Taking Father Home (2005)¹
Length and format	111 minutes, shot on DV cam PAL, in Chinese (Sichuan dialect)¹^•²
Setting	A rapidly industrializing city in southwestern China, Zigong in Sichuan, marked by pollution and slums⁶
Principal cast	Zeng Xiaofei as Xiaofen, Deng Gang as her boyfriend, with Zhao Ke¹^•²
Key awards	Special Jury Prize, Tokyo FilmEx 2006; Woosuk Award for Best Film, Jeonju 2007; Special Jury Award, Singapore 2007¹^•⁷^•²
Production	90 Minutes Film Studio; screenplay, production design and sound by Ying Liang and producer Peng Shan¹

Spoilers

Story

Xiaofen, a young woman played by Zeng Xiaofei, takes a job as a clerk at a law firm in one of the explosively growing cities of southwestern China. Her work consists of listening to clients and documenting their cases¹. The women who come to the office complain about husbands who refuse divorce, domestic violence, unfair employment and industrial injuries, while the male lawyers politely inform them of their legal powerlessness⁶. Other clients include a chemical-plant owner fearful of a lawsuit from sick workers, a saleswoman seeking custody of her child, and a battered wife whose army-officer husband holds all the advantages⁸.

Xiaofen's own life is no more secure than her clients'. Her boyfriend Deng Gang, a drinker and gambler recently out of prison, disappears one day, apparently implicated in a homicide, and she searches the city for him¹^•⁶. Her mother presses marriage-ready suitors on her, and rumors spread of a disaster at the local chemical plant that threatens to poison the entire city⁹. The film ends with a long, restrained shot of Xiaofen walking away from the camera across a wide bridge, an ambiguous resolution followed by a brief coda in which an earlier scene is replayed backwards in monochrome slow motion¹⁰.

Style and production

Documentary and fiction combined. The film intercuts two strands: the law-office interviews, in which complainants speak their grievances straight into the camera, and Xiaofen's personal story. Ying Liang and his producer and co-scriptwriter Peng Shan treat both in a restrained, detailed and compassionate way, and critics noted how seamlessly the fictional and documentary narrative styles blend¹. The film was made with non-professional actors and DV cameras, and Ying shot the reality of Zigong, the Sichuan city where he lived, in a documentary-like realistic style⁶.

The formal construction reinforces the title's meaning. Interior scenes use fixed, eye-level, medium-distance shots, and the film opens with a three-minute close-up of Xiaofen being interviewed by an offscreen recruiter, establishing a divide between what is shown and what is withheld. The director uses the two story lines, the plaintiffs' narrations and Xiaofen's private life, to examine the relationship between the collective and the individual, the public and the personal³. Sound is often mismatched to image: Xiaofen's distress is voiced not by her but by a stranger, a plaintiff complaining about a gambling husband, heard over a shot of Xiaofen riding a bus³.

The production followed the same path as the debut. Ying made Taking Father Home in 2005 for about $5,000, earned by writing television drama scripts, and funded The Other Half with the prize money that film won at festivals plus some European funding; the Rotterdam festival's Hubert Bals Fund also supported it¹¹.

Reception and awards

The film premiered at Tokyo FilmEx in late 2006 and won the festival's special jury prize¹. In 2007 it took the top Woosuk Award at the eighth Jeonju International Film Festival, where the Indie Vision jury called it "an excellent portrait of the problems faced by modern society"⁷, and the Special Jury Award at the Singapore International Film Festival; it was also an official selection at Rotterdam 2007 and screened at San Francisco, Hong Kong, and other festivals²^•⁹. A fanhall listing also credits a best Asian film award at the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival in Indonesia¹².

Critics placed it within Chinese independent cinema's regional turn. A 2015 scholarly study describes it as an exemplar of formalistic experimentation that presents space as a pivot of relations, challenging the metanarrative of national progression in which inland cities belong to a bygone time³. In a 2008 poll of best Chinese-language films of the 2000s, several programmers and filmmakers, including critic Neil Young and director Yang Jin, listed it among their choices¹³. The film later appeared in the San Sebastian Festival's 2011 "Digital Shadows: Last Generation Chinese Film" cycle of digitally shot Chinese features from 2000 to 2010¹⁴.

Distribution in China

Ying Liang's films are not released in Chinese movie theaters; they circulate at independent film festivals, on DVDs and downloads, a route he described as a way to avoid the official censorship applied to industrially produced, theatrically released films¹¹. Even the DVD route closed for this film: in a 2008 interview Ying said that The Other Half and his third feature Good Cats had not been released on DVD because regulations had suddenly become strict¹⁵.

Director

Ying Liang (应亮) was born in Shanghai in 1977, studied film in the Art Department of Beijing Normal University, and graduated from the Directing Department of the Film School of Chongqing University¹⁶. After The Other Half he made Good Cats (2008), the short Condolences (2009), and When Night Falls (2012), which won him the Best Director award at Locarno and led to his exile in Hong Kong after Chinese authorities declared him persona non grata for screening the film internationally¹⁷. He is also a festival organizer and educator, and founded the Chongqing Independent Film and Video Festival in 2007, the first film festival in Western China¹⁸.

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 › Biographical and historical drama films 2000s › Released 2006 to 2009

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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