Shower

With Shower, which won the Golden Alexander and the audience award at the festival of Thessaloniki, Zhang Yang is serenading traditional values that are in danger of being lost: friendship, family bonds and community spirit. He does not achieve this by confronting them with modernisation and individuality as evils, but by choosing an excellent cast and creating situations that are striking, amusing and moving. For centuries, public baths have played a major role in Chinese community life as meeting places. With his mentally handicapped son, Liu manages a rundown bath house in Beijing where many elderly men still come to bathe, to gossip, to drink tea or play chess. Without clothes and hence deprived of social status, everyone is equal. Liu’s eldest son left for the South many years ago to make his fortune in a dynamic region in development. He returns to Beijing in the assumption that his father has died. Although he always considered the family business to be a burden and is alienated from his roots, he feels responsible both for the decaying bathhouse and for the fate of his father and brother. The imminent closure of the baths forces him to think about what modernisation has meant for his own personal life.