General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Sun Also Rises (太阳照常升起) (2007 film)

The Sun Also Rises (太阳照常升起; Tai yang zhao chang sheng qi) is a 2007 Chinese drama film directed by Jiang Wen, his third feature as a director, adapted from Ye Mi's novella Velvet (天鹅绒) and told as four interconnected, magical-realist stories set mainly in 1976.¹^•² It competed for the Golden Lion at the 64th Venice International Film Festival and won Best Film Editing at the 44th Golden Horse Awards.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Directed by Jiang Wen; screenplay by Shu Ping, Jiang Wen, and Guo Shixing, from Ye Mi's novella Velvet²
Structure	Four segments, 疯 (Madness), 恋 (Love), 枪 (Gun), 梦 (Dream), presented non-chronologically: spring, summer, and autumn 1976, then winter 1958³
Cast	Joan Chen, Zhou Yun, Jaycee Chan, Anthony Wong, Jiang Wen, Kong Wei¹
Music and photography	Score by Joe Hisaishi; cinematography by Zhao Fei, Mark Ping-Bin Lee, and Yang Tao⁴
Release	Premiered in Venice on September 4, 2007; mainland China release September 21, 2007; 116 minutes⁵^•⁶
Languages	Mandarin Chinese, Wenzhou dialect, Russian, and Uyghur⁶
Major awards	Golden Horse Award for Best Film Editing (2007); Asian Film Awards 2008 for Best Supporting Actress (Joan Chen) and Best Production Design¹

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film is a polyptych of interconnected stories shifting between a village in southern China, a university campus, and the Gobi Desert.¹ Chinese-language criticism conventionally labels the four segments 疑疯 (Madness), 恋 (Love), 枪 (Gun), and 梦 (Dream), in the order presented: spring 1976, summer 1976, autumn 1976, and winter 1958.³

In the first segment, a young widow called the Mad Mother (Zhou Yun) goes mad after losing a pair of embroidered shoes and lives erratically with her son Li Dongfang (Jaycee Chan) in a remote southern village.⁶ In the second, at a university in eastern China, Teacher Liang (Anthony Wong) becomes a suspect after five women claim they were groped at an outdoor film screening.⁶ In the third, Old Tang (Jiang Wen) and his wife (Kong Wei) are sent down to the village for rehabilitation; Tang hunts with the village children while his neglected wife looks for a new life, and the segment ends with a gunshot.⁶^•³ The final segment returns to 1958, when Tang's wife and the pregnant Mad Mother ride camels side by side through Xinjiang toward two very different fates.⁶

The underlying plot, drawn from Velvet, concerns the Tang couple's years in the countryside: the wife takes the 20-year-old production-team leader Li Dongfang as a lover, and when the husband discovers the affair, he hears her say that "someone once said my skin is like velvet." Because the mountain-raised young man does not know what velvet is, the husband sets out to find the fabric so the young man can die "understanding" what he is being killed for.⁸

The chronology is deliberately scrambled. In narrative terms, the "Gun" segment is the end of the story and the "Dream" segment is its beginning; the "Madness" segment functions as the first narrative, with "Love" and "Dream" as its analepses, in the sense used by the French narratologist Gérard Genette.⁹ Critics note that the film relies heavily on metaphor, symbolism, stream of consciousness, and flashback, so that viewers cannot easily extract a causal chain, which is why many found it hard to follow.³ The Busan festival's program note describes characters who accept what happens without knowing what it means, while the director and audience see the causal relations from an omniscient point of view, and adds that some things in the film even the director cannot explain.⁴

Production

Jiang Wen wrote and directed the film seven years after his previous feature, producing it through Beijing Buyilehu Films in co-production with Beijing Taihe Yingshi and Hong Kong's Emperor Motion Pictures.⁶^•⁷ The crew included the Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi, who wrote the score, and three cinematographers, Zhao Fei, Mark Ping-Bin Lee, and Yang Tao; editing is credited to Zhang Yifan and Jiang Wen.⁴^•⁷ The film was shot in 35 mm color, and its dialogue moves among Mandarin, the Wenzhou dialect, Russian, and Uyghur.⁷^•⁶

Festival run and reception

The film had its global premiere in Venice competition on September 4, 2007.⁵ It then played in the Special Presentations program at the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival, the Dragons & Tigers series at the 26th Vancouver International Film Festival, and A Window on Asian Cinema at the 12th Pusan International Film Festival, all in 2007.¹

Reception at Venice was cool. The festival journal Ciak recorded that both Italian media and public scores for the film were not high and polarized.¹⁰ A Xinhua-sourced report noted that overseas critics largely passed over the film; The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, surveying the festival's first phase, recommended several titles but said nothing about it, and the report attributed the neglect partly to Jiang Wen's low output as a director and the film's small distribution footprint.⁵

Awards. At the 44th Golden Horse Awards (2007) the film won Best Film Editing for Zhang Yifan and Jiang Wen, with nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay Adaptation.¹ At the 2nd Asian Film Awards (2008) Joan Chen won Best Supporting Actress and Cao Juiping and Zhang Jianqun won Best Production Design, with nominations for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Visual Effects.¹ The film was also nominated for Best Asian Film at the 27th Hong Kong Film Awards and won Best Cinematography at the 9th Changchun Film Festival.¹

Commercial performance. The mainland release on September 21, 2007 met a cold box office, and the obscure narrative drew considerable controversy at the time.⁶^•¹¹ A retrospective assessment published in 2026, nineteen years after release, records that the film's artistic value has been increasingly recognized with time and that it remains a much-discussed work of Chinese auteur cinema.¹¹

Critical standing

Chinese-language scholarship treats the film as a case study in breaking with linear narrative. One analysis calls it Jiang Wen's most charming yet hardest-to-understand work, building a Cultural Revolution era of bright, magical color rather than the conventional gray image.⁹ Another describes its display of a "quasi-impossible world" as creating a fantastical, gorgeous style with strong appeal, and reads its ending's sense of endless循环 as echoing the title.³ A comparative study with Kurosawa's Rashomon places both films among representative cases of narrative-structure innovation in cinema, noting that although the film failed to win at international festivals and earned little at the domestic box office, its structural innovation and allegorical expression offered a meaningful reference for Chinese film.¹²

References

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