''Back to 1942'' is a 2012 Chinese historical film directed by

Feng Xiaogang Feng Xiaogang (; born 18 March 1958 in Beijing) is a Chinese film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and politician. He is well known in China as a highly successful commercial filmmaker whose comedy films do consistently well at the box o ...

. It is based on Liu Zhenyun's novel ''Remembering 1942'', and is about a major famine in Henan, China, during the

Second Sino-Japanese War The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) or War of Resistance (Chinese term) was a military conflict that was primarily waged between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. The war made up the Chinese theater of the wider Pacific Thea ...

. On 11 November 2012, the film premiered at the International Rome Film Festival. The film was selected as the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the

86th Academy Awards The 86th Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best films of 2013 and took place on March 2, 2014, at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. ...

, but was not nominated.

Plot

The film is set in

Henan Henan (; or ; ; alternatively Honan) is a landlocked province of China, in the central part of the country. Henan is often referred to as Zhongyuan or Zhongzhou (), which literally means "central plain" or "midland", although the name is al ...

, China in the winter of 1942, during the

. Master Fan is a wealthy landlord in a village in Henan. When the village is suffering from famine, Fan still has plenty of food to feed his family and the villagers. A group of bandits come and rob the village, eventually burning it down to the ground. Fan's son dies in the process of stopping the bandits. Fan flees his hometown with his daughter, wife and daughter-in-law. They are accompanied by a servant, Shuanzhu. While they are fleeing to the west, they meet Xialu, a fellow villager, and the latter's family. They decide to travel together, but Fan's food supply and money are stolen by

NRA The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) is a gun rights advocacy group based in the United States. Founded in 1871 to advance rifle marksmanship, the modern NRA has become a prominent gun rights lobbying organization while contin ...

soldiers amidst the chaos caused by Japanese bombing. Brother Sim insists on preaching the Catholic faith in the starving province. After surviving a few Japanese bombings and witnessing many innocent people dying, he takes refuge under Father Megan but starts doubting the presence of God. Meanwhile, ''

Time Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, t ...

'' correspondent Theodore H. White treks to Henan to investigate the famine. He discovers that while people are dying every day and some have even resorted to cannibalism, the Nationalist Government is still not doing anything to help the refugees.

Chiang Kai-shek Chiang Kai-shek (31 October 1887 – 5 April 1975), also known as Chiang Chung-cheng and Jiang Jieshi, was a Chinese Nationalist politician, revolutionary, and military leader who served as the leader of the Republic of China (ROC) from 1928 ...

even wants to give up defending Henan, leaving the refugees to the Japanese. White's report is eventually published in the magazine, causing the Nationalist Government to make a U-turn on their policy. However, when relief supplies are being distributed in the province, the local officials and soldiers start fighting over who should receive a larger share. The plight of Master Fan continues as his family members die one by one. He is eventually forced to sell his daughter into prostitution in return for food. Losing hope on life, he heads back to the east in the hope of dying somewhere near his home. On his way back, he meets a little girl who has just lost her mother. He adopts the girl as his granddaughter and they continue their journey.

Cast

Zhang Guoli Zhang Guoli (born 17 January 1955) is a Chinese actor and film director who was a '' xiangsheng'' actor before he started working on films and television series. He is mostly known for his roles playing the Emperor in various dramas involving Qi ...

as Master Fan *

Chen Daoming Chen Daoming (born 26 April 1955) is a Chinese actor who has starred in various genres of film and television series. Career Chen graduated from the Central Academy of Drama. His first notable role was "Puyi" (the last emperor of China) in the ...

Li Xuejian Li Xuejian (; born February 20, 1954) is a Chinese actor. He played the role Song Jiang in '' The Water Margin'', a 1998 television series adapted from the Chinese classical novel of the same title. Li also played the roles of military personn ...

as Li Peiji * Zhang Hanyu as Brother Sim * Fan Wei as Ma * Feng Yuanzheng as Xialu * Xu Fan as Huazhi *

Tim Robbins Timothy Francis Robbins (born October 16, 1958) is an American actor and filmmaker. He is known for portraying Andy Dufresne in the film '' The Shawshank Redemption ''(1994), and has won an Academy Award and two Golden Globe Awards for his role ...

as Bishop Megan *

Adrien Brody Adrien Nicholas Brody (born April 14, 1973) is an American actor. He received widespread recognition and acclaim after starring as Władysław Szpilman in Roman Polanski's '' The Pianist'' (2002), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Ac ...

as Theodore H. White * Yao Jingyi as Lingdang * Peng Jiale as Liubao * Li Qian as Master Fan's daughter-in-law * Yuan Huifang as Master Fan's wife * Zhang Shaohua as Xialu's mother * Wang Ziwen as Master Fan's daughter Xingxing * Zhang Mo as Shuanzhu * Zhao Yi as Master Fan's son * Zhang Shu as Dong Jiayao * Tian Xiaojie as middle-aged officer * Ke Lan as

Soong Mei-ling Soong Mei-ling (also spelled Soong May-ling, ; March 5, 1898 – October 23, 2003), also known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek or Madame Chiang, was a Chinese political figure who was First Lady of the Republic of China, the wife of Generalissimo a ...

* Zhang Guoqiang as Dong Yingbin * Yu Zhen as Jiang Dingwen * Chang Chen-kuang as Zhang Lisheng * Lin Yongjian as County Magistrate Yue *

Duan Yihong Duan Yihong (; born May 16, 1973) is a Chinese actor best known for his role as Yuan Lang in '' Soldiers Sortie'' (2006), Long Wenzhang in '' My Chief and My Regiment'' (2009), and Hei Wa in '' White Deer Plain'' (2011). Biography Duan Yihon ...

as Chen Bulei * Peter Noel Duhamel as

Joseph Stilwell Joseph Warren "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell (March 19, 1883 – October 12, 1946) was a United States Army general who served in the China Burma India Theater during World War II. An early American popular hero of the war for leading a column walking o ...

* James A. Beattle as Clarence E. Gauss * Luo Yang as

Soong Ching-ling Rosamond Soong Ch'ing-ling (27 January 189329 May 1981) was a Chinese political figure. As the third wife of Sun Yat-sen, then Premier of the Kuomintang and President of the Republic of China, she was often referred to as Madame Sun Yat-sen. ...

* Qiao Zhenyu as Secretary Han * Li Xiaozhou as Sun Ciwei * Zhang Jie as Li Peiji's secretary * Nathaniel Boyd as American embassy translator * Chen Yusheng as Fang Ce * Hao Jianmin as Zhang Guangyu * Yu Genyi as Lu Daping * Zhang Dongsheng as Luo Zhen * Jiang Yanming as Luo Wu * Zhang Zhijian as Zhang Fang * Lü Zhong as Zhang Fang's mother * Jie Bing as Li Fukuan * Yasuyuki Hirata as

Yasuji Okamura was a general of the Imperial Japanese Army, and commander-in-chief of the China Expeditionary Army from November 1944 to the end of World War II. He was tried but found not guilty of any war crimes by the Shanghai War Crimes Tribunal after the ...

* Kenichi Miura as Jirou Takahashi

Alec Su Alec Su You-peng (born 11 September 1973) is a Taiwanese actor, singer, television producer, and film director. Su became a popular teen idol in the 1980s as a member of the boyband '' Xiao Hu Dui''. He was known as the "Obedient Tiger" (乖� ...

's scenes as T. V. Soong were deleted in the final cut of the film.

Reception

''Back to 1942'' received mixed reviews. It has a 40% approval rating on the

review aggregator A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews of products and services (such as films, books, video games, software, hardware, and cars). This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users ...

website

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wan ...

, based on 10 reviews with an average rating of 5.2/10.

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

gave the film a score of 41/100 based on six reviews. Xan Brooks of ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide ...

'' wrote: Dan Fainaru of ''

Screen Daily ''Screen International'' is a British film magazine covering the international film business. It is published by Media Business Insight, a British B2B media company. The magazine is primarily aimed at those involved in the global film business. ...

'' wrote: Giovanni Vimercati of the

China Internet Information Center China Internet Information Center (; or 中国网/网上中国) is a state-run web portal of the People's Republic of China and published under the auspices of the State Council Information Office and the China International Publishing Group. ...

wrote: Daniel Eagan of '' Film Journal'' wrote: Neil Genzlinger of

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

wrote:

Awards

The film won the A.I.C. Award for Best Cinematography during its premiere at the International Rome Film Festival in November 2012, and the Golden Butterfly Award. The movie won both Best Feature Film Award and Visual Effects Award at the 13th Beijing International Film Festival in 2013. It also won the Best Film of Mainland and Taiwan at the 32nd

Hong Kong Film Award The Hong Kong Film Awards (HKFA; ), founded in 1982, is an annual film awards ceremony in Hong Kong. The ceremonies are typically in April. The awards recognise achievement in various aspects of filmmaking, such as directing, screenwriting, ...

s in 2013.

References

External links