Ziliang Zhang

A communist soldier is sent to a remote region of China in order to collect folk songs. Staying with a peasant family (a widower with two small children), he discovers a community whose way of life is completely alien to him, but he gradually wins their trust.

Director Zhang Junzhao's superbly tense revisionist war film (featuring striking cinematography from future Fifth Generation standard bearer Zhang Yimou) is widely considered to be the first work of Mainland Fifth Generation cinema.