“Getting Home” (落叶归根; Luo Ye Gui Gen) is an award winning Chinese black comedy directed by Zhang Yang and starred veteran comedian Zhao Benshan.

Chinese movie Getting Home

Getting Home synopsis

Zhao and Liu were two migrant workers and good friends who left their respective villages and travelled thousand of miles away to Shenzhen to make a better living.

Liu passed away unexpectedly after a night of drinking, and Zhao (Zhao Benshan) decided to keep his promise to bring the remain to be buried in his hometown, and thus embarked on a long journey from Shenzhen to Chongqing.

Having limited budget, Zhao had to resort to carrying Liu on his back and hitch-hiking along the way, in which he met variety of people with different personality – some good, some bad and some weird…

The movie was very well received in China, as it shows some sad reality of modern China (albeit in a comedic way) while also showing some of the good things. It shares dark humour, random sadness, unconditional love, amazing sceneries, undying commitment, total weirdness and most importantly… facts of life.

Zhao Benshan played the role to perfection, showing the naive but honest nature of a Chinese labour who tried to fulfill a difficult promise. Other small and cameo roles are equally interesting and was played by some of the most popular artists in mainland China.

If you are into Chinese movies and culture, this is a highly recommended movie. Western movie critics have given the movie some nice ratings, but I think the westerners might be difficult to appreciate the movie if they don’t know much about the Chinese culture… worth trying though.

Movie Trailer


10 Responses to “Getting Home (2007) review”

  1. #1. Loki on August 2nd, 2008

    oohhh, i wanna see this. thanks for sharing.

  2. #2. kyon on August 3rd, 2008

    don’t know any of the artistes, must be a very china-based chinese movie. the trailer looks fun, might be a good movie.. time to search for torrent :p

  3. #3. Yein Jee on August 3rd, 2008

    You are welcome Loki.

    kyon… it’s a very China-based movie instead. The likes of Zhao Benshan and Song Dandan etc. are not well known outside of China, but in the Chinese mainland itself… they are probably more popular than western stars like Tom Cruise etc.

  4. #4. Eloy on August 3rd, 2008

    would this sorta of be like the long walk home?

  5. #5. Yein Jee on August 3rd, 2008

    Eloy… too different.

  6. #6. cole on August 4th, 2008

    Sounds great. Coincidently, my two best Chinese friends are from Shenzhen and Chong Ching, so I’ll be especially interested. Maybe it will play in the west at some of the so-called “art theaters”. They usually show thw foreign films. Those kinds of movies are actually becoming more popular in the west gradually.

  7. #7. cole on August 4th, 2008

    A dead body would have to be smelling pretty bad pretty quickly though. lol.

  8. #8. Yein Jee on August 4th, 2008

    Disguising the dead body is part of the fun about the movie…

  9. #9. Kiwi skateboards 12,000km from Europe to China | YeinJee's Asian News on October 3rd, 2008

    [...] Rob’s attempt is currently being considered as a new world record by Guinness; the current world record for distance skateboarding is ~5,800km. Video below is a summary of his final 1,200km journey from Xixia to Shanghai; cool stuff, and reminds me of Chinese movie “Getting Home“… [...]

  10. #10. venkat on June 29th, 2009

    where can i download this torrent
    film.


Leave a Reply

All above fields optional; a nickname is recommended. Thanks for sharing your comments.


Related Tags



RSS and Newsletter


RSS and XML feed
Enter your email address for updates