The Story of Qiu Ju (1992)

A superb movie, much superior in my view to Raise the Red Lantern, about a naive, but very persistent peasant woman who presses her claim against a village injustice through layer after layer of maddeningly unresponsive Chinese bureaucracy. The director has a perfect, deft, light, faintly comic touch. This movie is far more witty and lyrical and almost literary in its plot and paradoxes. It is thus more effective than more thunderous critiques on the evils of bureaucracy. Multiculturally applicable; in fact, it can be compared to the tale of simple naive but strangely persistent American peasant, Paula Jones, in pressing her complaint about President Clinton.....