Ailiya Movies
- 2005
Fang Gangliang's drama The Story of Xiaoyan stars u Xu as Xiaoyan, a young teenage girl with a bright academic future. However, on the last day before summer break she learns that her mother will be unable to pay the tuition for next year. Refusing to settle for life as a young bride, she attempts to raise the money herself by starting various projects over the course of the summer. She resents that her lazy brothers will still be attending school, and this sense of injustice helps drive her large ambitions. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Wu Xujing, Yang Shulin, (more)
- 2003
Director Yu Zhong's slice of Chinese life Wode Meili Xiangchou (Far From Home) combines the story of a young woman trying to make it in a new city with the tale of a single mother who loses her job in that same city. Liu Xuan plays Xi, who, after a period of unemployment upon her arrivinal in Guangzhou, takes a job as a waitress. She makes new friends with her employers and her regular customers, but life a new place is still difficult on her. Xu Jinglei must decide to either leave town, or begin a new business venture. The women's friends and mothers provide support and guidance. ~ Perry Seibert, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Liu Xuan, Xu Jinglei, (more)
- 1994
Near a pass in the mountains in northern China, a woman (Ailiya) lives in an abandoned Christian church. The only people she sees are porters, men who serve as packhorses for supplies from one side of the mountains to the other. Sometimes she feeds them, or tends their wounds. Sometimes she has sex with them. When one of the rough-mannered porters (Zhao Xiaorui) is injured and stays behind with her, it poses complications, because though she has slept with him on occasion, she'd really like to get her hands on another porter, whose manner is much gentler and who is a really good looking man (Xie Yuan). Before they can resolve the tension between them, the Japanese occupy the pass, complicating matters considerably. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ailiya
- 1994
- NR
A satire of the influence of Western values and ideals on Eastern culture, Chinese director Zhou Xiaowen's Ermo stars actress Ailiya as its titular heroine, a beautiful middle-aged wife and mother who undertakes an obsessive struggle to earn enough money to buy her family a television. In a dreary, remote Chinese village, miles away from anything smacking of the modern, Ermo lives with her son Huzi (Yan Zhenguo) and her husband (Ge Zhijun) -- a lazy, whiny, and impotent man who spends his time drinking medicine that he hopes will restore his virility. After traveling to the nearest town to sell the noodles that she makes, she spies a large television set in a department-store window and becomes obsessed with the notion of purchasing the biggest TV in the community in order to earn a spot of honor and envy on the social ladder. Sadly, she becomes increasingly sucked into the vacuum of capitalism, ultimately finding herself an object of mass consumption as well. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
