Lu Hui

A young peasant boy who is bullied by local noblemen seeks to learn drunken boxing from the head of a local martial arts school. When the boy beats up his previous tormentors, the nobles patriarch challenges the boys teacher, the drunken master, who defeats the lot of them. Embarrased, the nobles retain two hired snake style killers. They kill everyone except the peasant boy.

Freely adapted from Gabriel García Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the film follows the investigation of a local teacher's murder in a small and desperately poor rural village, the story of the crime gradually pieced together from the fragmented memories of witnesses forced to testify at an inquest. Sharing with her Fifth Generation colleagues Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang a remarkable eye for the barren landscapes of northern China and a fascination with small-town life — especially those enduring superstitions that Communism failed to erase — director Li Shaohong also introduces several formal innovations, particularly in storytelling structure, that remain unprecedented in Chinese cinema.