Beijing Bicycle

Director: Xiaoshuai Wang

2001 / 113min / 35mm

When a teenaged bicycle messenger from the countryside working in Beijing discovers that his mode of transportation and source of livelihood has been stolen he begins a seemingly impossible search, scouring the sprawling megacity for his missing property As vital a portrait of hand-to-mouth living in the Chinese capital at the beginning of the 21st century as its spiritual ancestor, Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, was of impoverished postwar Rome, Wang’s film is no simple remake, using the premise of its Italian inspiration to explore the divide between rural migrant youths and their upwardly mobile urban contemporaries.