Walking on the Wild Side

Han Jie’s feature debut draws on his own experiences growing up in a desolate mining district in northern China’s Shanxi province. A Chinese road movie, Walking on the Wild Side charts a young gang’s continuous flights from one kind of trouble to the next. Mirroring the stark and barren landscape, the film relays the grim story of these delinquents’ dreams of liberty and easy money. Played by nonprofessional actors who are real life troublemakers, the film offers a realism that is at once oppressive, cruel, and sympathetic. Produced by Jia Zhangke – asiasociety.org

Han excels at capturing the deadening landscape of barren hills and exhaust-filled skies, physical manifestations of the numbed inhabitants. – Jay Weissberg, Variety

Chines title: LAI XIAO ZI
DIR: Han Jie
PROD: Jia Zhangke, Natacha Devillers
SCR: Han Jie
DP: Wei Xu, Li Hongjian
CAST: Bai Paijiang, Guo Qiang, Hou Jing, Lu Jie, Tian Zhaoting,Zhang Xingxing
PROD: DES Liu Giang

Plot : Han Jie sets the story in his native province of Shanxi in Northwest China, where coal mines sprang up all over the place during the nineties. The main character is also called Han Jie (the director's alter ego, he based the film largely on his own experiences) and grows up in this heavily polluted area, where most of the young men engage in petty crimes, like gambling and stealing. The young Han soon becomes a victim of the youth gang of Xiaosi, basically a bunch of feeble-minded idiots who spend most of their day harassing school boys for their money, when they're not drunk or raping girls. When Han's cousin Xiping teaches Xiaosi and his "Gang of the Four Stars" a lesson, the gang members vow revenge, forcing him and Han to flee town.