Jing Ai

Two Chinese miners, who make money by killing fellow miners and then extorting money from the mine owner to keep quiet about the "accident", happen upon their latest victim. But one of them begins to have second thoughts.

In 1985, Cheung Yau-ming was one of five miscreants involved in the brutal murder of a white couple. As he was still a juvenile, the court ordered him to be "detained at Her Majesty's pleasure," a clause in British law allowing the government to imprison young offenders for an indefinite period. The film picks up in 1997, with Yau-ming (now 28) being paid a visit by a girl named Cheung Yue-ling. With only six months to go before the Handover, Yau-ming and 22 other prisoners hope to have their sentences determined soon, fearing what might happen should the decision about what to do with them become the province of incoming Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa.

Five girls grow up in China during the first years of the twentieth century. When they become adults they have to learn that women are almost without rights. Other women close to them are suppressed in the most brutal way. When Mingtao is to marry a mentally deficient but rich man, she and her friends decide to escape and to search for the mythical "garden" where a woman's life is worth living.

In the 1990s, a series of murders rocks a run-down industrial city in north-eastern China.