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Figure 14: The closing scene in Platform (2000)
homosexuality, and religion. For example, Li Yang’s Mang jing (Blind
shaft, 2002), in Henan Mandarin, is a crime story that is both chilling
and provocative. Two con men murder fellow workers in the illegal coal
mines and claim compensation by posing as relatives of the victims. In a
sympathetic light, the film explores the social factors responsible for the
criminals’ moral decline. Wang Chao’s Anyang ying’er (Orphan of Anyang,
2001), in Henan Kaifeng Mandarin, is about a laid-off worker who, after
adopting the baby of a prostitute from the Northeast, ends up imprisoned
for killing a local gangster, the orphan’s alleged birth father. Liu Bingjian’s
Kuqi de nüren (Crying woman, 2002), in Guizhou Mandarin, is a black
comedy about a debt-ridden woman who becomes a professional mourner,
putting on a show of wailing at funerals. Gan Xiao’er’s Shan qing shui xiu
(The only sons, 2002), in Cantonese, explores how Christianity offers comfort
to impoverished rural Chinese such as Ah Shui, who has to sell his only baby
boy to raise money to commute his criminal brother’s death sentence to
life imprisonment. Yet after both his brother and his wife die, the dying
Ah Shui despairs: he is unable to take care of his baby who is returned to
him in the state’s crackdown on baby traders. With a similar concern about
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