That's dirty work
A new Chinese filmmaker + my 2025 roundup
A very slightly belated end-of-year newsletter. Read on to learn about the greatest Chinese filmmaker you’ve never heard of. The other lists and countdowns and goals etc. are for paid subscribers, who will be getting 26 newsletters in 2026 with two extra sprinkled in for Q1 (Numerology!!!).
Da Shibiao (达式彪)
My best ever 2026 discovery came really late in the year and also sort of by accident. It’s Da Shibiao (1938-1996), a Mainland Chinese actor-turned-director who is unknown outside his home country. He should be massive for his films Porn Freak (夜幕下的黄色幽灵, 1989) and Night at the Dream Diner (梦酒家之夜, 1992). Unfortunately neither has English subtitles right now - I am making a list of people I might be able to email in the new year. Also I am about to post lots of screencaps because I took one approximately every five seconds. The reason I’m not locking this part of the newsletter is because I want Da Shibiao indexed! I want everyone to know how cool he is so I can make a major contribution to a Da Shibiao revival!
The full story: I am trying to complete something called the Language Learner’s Super Challenge, which involves watching 100 films in Mandarin over 20 months. To ensure I get an even distribution of films from the 1980s to 2020s, I pick a randomised year every time and then choose something that looks interesting. I got stuck looking for Chinese films from 1989, found a Douban list called something like “Chinese films from 1989,” and then saw the poster for Porn Freak, which rivalled the most surreal film posters from 1980s Poland.1
Porn Freak is possibly my best film discovery ever. It’s billed in a few Chinese video essays as the first Mainland film to ever deal with the subject of pornography; it’s clearly supposed to be a Reefer Madness-style cautionary tale, complete with episodes of blackmail, grooming and gonorrhoea.
Stylistically it runs counter to everything I thought 1980s Chinese cinema was supposed to be. If you made a film out of my personal proclivities and aesthetic interests you would probably get Porn Freak. It is a classical film noir with very very strong undertones of Desperately Seeking Susan. There are countless shots of neon-lit synth-filled nightclubs, bright red nails, and long drags on cigarettes; the film even has a mostly-faceless noir-esque antiheroine, who holds a white dog and sits behind a sliding bookcase. There is a bordering-on-genius colour scheme, with contrasting pinks and greens almost everywhere. There is also a brilliantly elemental ending, the sort you might recognise from films like Key Largo or Humoresque.
The prevailing question: where exactly did Da get his style from? Were there other directors working like this; is there any precedent at all for this kind of thing in a country still in the grip of ? Could it have come via Hong Kong? Da was signed to the Shanghai Film Studio for his entire career; it seemed to be an insular production-line operation with tenured personnel, like MGM or Shaw Brothers Studios. But I can find very little about life there post-Deng, or house styles, or mentorship, or funding.
If I had even slightly less sense I would probably go back to university and write a master’s dissertation on Porn Freak. Also it taught me a new word for “gonorrhoea” which wasn’t even in my dictionary!
Night At the Dream Diner (1992) is a dramedy following multiple couples who visit a combination restaurant/psychiatrist’s office in shiny, metropolitan Shanghai. They have their problems and backstories; so does the therapist, who’s a New Woman on the run from her abusive husband. This wasn’t quite as visually singular as Porn Freak, but still interesting and eclectic, with occasional snatches (borrowings? premonitions?) from the Taiwanese New Wave.
Bonus Mandarin-language films I recommend that actually do have subtitles:
Kaili Blues, Only the River Flows, That Day on the Beach, The Alley (小街)
The Private Half: