Dead PigsMovies like Dead Pigs
- Key Features:
- Social commentary, Economic disparity, Gentrification, Cultural clash, Ensemble cast, Black comedy, Environmental disaster, Real estate development, Shanghai, Interconnected stories, Character study, Chinese history, Capitalism, Social issues
- Tone:
- serious, satirical
- Target Audience:
- Film festival enthusiasts, Socially conscious viewers, World cinema fans
- Emotional Arc:
- Disconnection → Absurdity
Dead Pigs

A pig farmer, a busboy, a salon owner, an expat architect and a jaded rich girl cross paths as thousands of dead pigs float down the Yangtze River toward Shanghai.
Dead Pigs
Two friends, Jung Jong-suk and Hwang Kyung-min, meet after several years and talk about their time in school, which left them scarred.

A black comedy about a farmer who tries to bring home the body of his friend, who died far from their town.

Two dramatic stories. In an undetermined past, a young cannibal (who killed his own father) is condemned to be torn to pieces by some wild beasts. In the second story, Julian, the young son of a post-war German industrialist, is on the way to lie down with his farm's pigs, because he doesn't like human relationships.

The lives of 4 interconnected South Koreans - a married couple, a novelist the wife is having an affair with, and a second woman the novelist is simultaneously involved with.

Two disaffected, unemployed Chinese youth drift through life on the streets of their industrial town, their paths crossing with that of a local young singer and dancer working for a liquor company as a spokesmodel.

A black comedy about the events that are set into motion in a town after a man-eating boar goes on a rampage.

Jérôme Varenne, a French financier, lives and works in Shanghai with Chen-Li, his life and business partner. One day, during a short stay in Paris, while paying a call to his mother, he is very displeased to learn from her and his hated brother, that the family house in Ambray is going to be sold. Jerome decides to go to the town where he grew up to see what is going on. Little does he know how eventful his escapade will be. Little does he know that it will change his life from soup to nuts...

Security guard Pickle and his trash collector friend Belly Button kill time together in night shifts watching the American-educated boss's dash-cam recordings of his various sexual encounters with women. Against the buddies' will, something horrifying rather than erotic reveals.

After a love affair ends badly, a young Parisian named Paul sinks into the same kind of deep depression that led his sister to kill herself. He moves back home with his father and aimless brother Jonathan but refuses to get out of bed.

A young man develops severe neck pain after swimming in a polluted river for a movie shoot, but nobody can provide him any relief.

China’s rapid changes from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, as seen through the lives of four performers in a theater troupe.

When a woman visits a Chinese doctor, she discovers her pain is due to pent-up rage, and the only cure is to fully express herself, whatever may come.

In the northern Chinese city of Manzhouli, they say there is an elephant that simply sits and ignores the world. Manzhouli becomes an obsession for the protagonists of this film, a longed-for escape from the downward spiral in which they find themselves.

Three parties pursue the million dollars that driver Xiao Zhang stole to help out his girlfriend.

China, the 1990s. A young bookseller is in love with a woman. The woman is now with another guy, a rich man. The rich man sends his people to beat the bookseller. In the fight, the laptop computer from a man looking at the scene gets broken. Who will pay for the computer? The bookseller wants revenge. Will it be useful? The bookseller and the laptop owner are from different ages and classes. They are two different points of view, two different Chinas. How will they fight for justice?

A group of idealistic but frustrated liberals succumb to the temptation of murdering right-wing pundits for their political beliefs.

In the city of Yokosuka, Kinta and his lover Haruko, both involved with yakuza, brave the post-occupation period with a goal to be together.

In good old days Franz Maurer and his partners from secret police used to live like kings. Now, they all must adapt to new post-communist environment where they are scorned and losing all the privileges. Some, like Franz, are like ordinary police fighting against drug dealers. But Franz would soon find that some of his friends are on the other side.

At the end of the 19th century, Shanghai is divided into several foreign concessions. In the British concession, a number of luxurious “flower houses” are reserved for the male elite of the city. Since Chinese dignitaries are not allowed to frequent brothels, these establishments are the only ones that these men can visit. They form a self-contained world, with its own rites, traditions and even its own language. The men don’t only visit the houses to frequent the courtesans but also to dine, smoke opium, play mahjong and relax. The women working there are known as the “flowers of Shanghai”.

A group of performing art troupe members each face their own trials and tribulations in Chengdu; from escaping a family scandal to dealing with unrequited love, each experiences rejection that shapes their lives.

After a tempest, fishermen do not find only fish in their nets. That is what happens to Jafaar, a poor fisherman who lives poorly in Gaza. And what he hauls in is really upsetting: imagine that, a pig! An unclean animal judged impure not only by the Faith of Islam but also by the Jewish religion. Determined to get rid of the animal, Jafaar tries desperately to sell it, first to a United Nations official, then to a Jewish colony where Yelena raises pigs not for their meat but for security reasons. Of course, going unnoticed in the company of a "forbidden" animal, among his Palestinian brothers, past Israeli soldiers and under the scrutiny of Islamic fundamentalists is no bed of roses and a series of misadventures await Jafaar.

When three friends open a hot pot restaurant in a former bomb shelter, they discover it’s linked by a single wall to the bank vault next door. While deciding to take the easy money or go to the police, they find out one of the bank’s employees is a former classmate and look to enlist her in deciding their future.

A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.

An aged father and his younger, mentally challenged son have been working hard every day to keep the bathhouse running for a motley group of regular customers. When his elder son, who left years ago to seek his fortune in the southern city of Shenzhen, abruptly returns one day, it once again puts under stress the long-broken father-son ties. Presented as a light-hearted comedy, Shower explores the value of family, friendship, and tradition.

A tremendous congestion hits the Rome highway ring. The biggest traffic jam ever seen lasts more than 36 hours. At the beginning the people blocked in their cars react normally. But as more time passes, the more we witness personal dramas, hysteric reactions and other grotesque situations. All the episodes are linked as if in a single plot. Cars and their hosts are a microcosm of stories part of a larger universe: the congestion.

A comedy that chronicles a chance encounter between Robert and a Chinese named Jun who wanders lost through the city of Buenos Aires in search of his uncle after being assaulted by a taxi driver and his henchmen.

When circumstances force an outlaw to impersonate a county governor and clean up a corrupt town, the Robin Hood figure finds himself in a showdown with the local godfather.

Liu Xing a brilliant Chinese student, arrives at University and makes the transition into American life with the help of Joanna Silver. Xing joins a cosmology group working to create a model of the origins of the universe. He is obsessed with the study of dark matter and a theory that conflicts with the group's model. When he begins to make breakthroughs of his own, he encounters obstructions.

A seventeen-year-old country boy working in Beijing as a courier has his bicycle stolen, and finds it with a schoolboy his age.

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.

A small town pickpocket whose friends have moved on to higher trades finds himself bitter and unable to adapt.

In this radical and endearing black comedy, a group of retrenched female factory workers decide to pool their compensation money… and hire a hit man to liquidate their boss.

A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.

A town in Fengjie county is gradually being demolished and flooded to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. A man and woman visit the town to locate their estranged spouses, and become witness to the societal changes.

A local activist and a budding young mayor clash over the best path forward for their impoverished suburb.

A New York University professor returns from a rescue mission to the Amazon rainforest with the footage shot by a lost team of documentarians who were making a film about the area's local cannibal tribes.

Braulio after his misadventures in Berlin, moves to Hong Kong along with Rafa and Hakan in search of new opportunities. However, it is not easy to succeed in a land where language, culture and customs are very different from Europe.

When four best friends try and move forward in their work and personal life, they realize that trying to live their life's dream is more difficult than they imagine -- especially in the high fashion world of Shanghai.

A criminal, a bank clerk and a police officer find their destinies entwined when a loan shark gets assaulted after having withdrawn $10 million from the bank in the midst of the world financial crisis.

Four lives intersect along the Ganges: a low caste boy in hopeless love, a daughter ridden with guilt of a sexual encounter ending in a tragedy, a hapless father with fading morality, and a spirited child yearning for a family, long to escape the moral constructs of a small-town.

Mory, a cowherd, and Anta, a university student, try to make money in order to go to Paris and leave their boring past behind.

An uncompromising look into urban life from the eyes of a voyeuristic photographer, a rebellious teenager, and a married couple teetering on the edge of adultery.

At Beijing World Park, a bizarre cross-pollination of Las Vegas and Epcot Center where visitors can interact with famous international monuments without ever leaving the city’s suburbs, a security guard betrays his dancer girlfriend by pursuing another woman.

Over three episodes, three respectable middle-aged men find themselves behaving badly. A teacher hides his pornographic magazine from a female student. A jogger steals milk and blames it on a newspaper delivery boy. A drunk man desperately searches for a public toilet late at night.

1990s, Banpo Town, rural China. A woman's body is found by the river. Ma Zhe, Chief of the Criminal Police, heads up the murder investigation that leads to an obvious arrest. His superiors hurry to congratulate him, but several clues push Ma Zhe to delve deeper into the hidden behaviour of his fellow citizens.

An unrecognizable, charred corpse discovered in a remote mountain village in China connects three local stories.

All unemployed, Ki-taek's family takes peculiar interest in the wealthy and glamorous Parks for their livelihood until they get entangled in an unexpected incident.

Hong Kong action diva Maggie Cheung comes to France when a past-his-prime director casts her in a remake of the silent classic Les Vampires. Clad in a rubber catsuit and unable to speak a word of French, Cheung finds herself adrift in the insanity of the film industry…

A bullied overweight teenager sees a glimpse of hope when her tormentors are brutally abducted by a mesmerizing stranger.

On a Tokyo dump’s shantytown edge, interwoven vignettes follow residents scraping by: a boy who “drives” an imaginary trolley, a homeless father and son designing a dream house, a young woman brutalized at home, drunks, schemers, and saints of small kindnesses. Kurosawa crafts a ragged mosaic of hardship, fantasy, and flickers of grace that keep people moving forward.

During the Japanese occupation of China, two prisoners are dumped in a peasant's home in a small town. The owner is bullied into keeping the prisoners until the next New Year, at which time they will be collected. The village leaders convene to interrogate the prisoners. The townspeople then struggle to accommodate the prisoners. One is a bellicose Japanese nationalist, the other a nervous translator. Will the townspeople manage to keep the prisoners until the New Year?

A love story between a country boy in Beijing to study and a wealthy businessman set against the backdrop of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident.

A look at modern-day life in China's capital centered on a ménage-a-quatre involving a young woman, her boss, her husband and her boss's wife.

Animals on a farm lead a revolution against the farmers to put their destiny in their own hands. However this revolution eats their own children and they cannot avoid corruption.

The lives of a macho butcher, his wife, a lonely waitress, a sadist and a flophouse manager intersect in Recife, Brazil.

During the Republican era, a group of frustrated people from the movie industry is invited in a luxurious mansion to make a movie out of a gruesome case that has recently rattled the city of Shanghai, in the hopes that it would turn into a huge sensation and make them famous. However, they never expected that the murderer would be in their midst and that the truth behind the case would be far more bizarre than their fictional movie plot.

Alone on a farm, a man spends his days tending to his animals, with a particular love for his sow. After an illicit encounter between the two creatures, the pig gives birth. However, tragedy strikes when the man tries to force the newborn piglets to love him as he loves them.

When her husband is kicked in the groin by the village head, Qiu Ju, a peasant woman, despite her pregnancy, travels to a nearby town, and later a big city to deal with its bureaucrats and find justice.

Arvid is an ordinary bank clerk who lives a rather unassuming life with his dear girlfriend. But his life is turned completely upside down when he bravely manages to avert a robbery against the bank where he works.

In post-Sept. 11 Los Angeles, tensions erupt when the lives of a Brentwood housewife, her district attorney husband, a Persian shopkeeper, two cops, a pair of carjackers and a Korean couple converge during a 36-hour period.

Shanghai gangsters grapple with lust and loyalty on the eve of war with Japan as they try to navigate an alliance with the enemy's army.

Pig and Runt born on the same day, in the same hospital, moments apart. Twins, all but by bloodline. Inseparable from birth, they are almost telepathic. They are one, needing no one else, inhabiting a delicate, insular and dangerous world where they make their own rules and have their own language. But days before their 17th birthday the balance of their world begins to shift. Pig's sexual awakening and jealousy begins to threaten their private universe.

The arrogant, third most-wanted criminal in Taiwan, decides to get rid of the top two competitors and crowns himself the most-wanted criminal before dying.

Liam Liu unwittingly gets involved with a high school girl. He suddenly has to go to China after learning from his father that he has inherited his grandmother's home in Shanghai. He's not very appreciative of his Chinese roots, and at first, only wants to sell the house and get back to the U.S. as fast as possible. He gets a taste of the Chinese culture and ends up having some big decisions to make.

Four friends become stranded in Eastern Europe and have to become hit men, prostitutes, corrupt cops, smugglers and more to make it home.

A man is forced to completely change his habits when he decides to move from the country to the city.

A monumental traffic jam serves as the backdrop for the lives of the inhabitants of a Swedish city.

In a post-apocalyptic world, the residents of an apartment above the butcher shop receive an occasional delicacy of meat, something that is in low supply. A young man new in town falls in love with the butcher's daughter, which causes conflicts in her family, who need the young man for other business-related purposes.

On the edge of the Gobi desert in Northwest China, Lang returns to his hometown after being released from jail. While working for the local dog patrol team to clear the town of stray dogs before the Olympic Games, he strikes up an unlikely connection with a black dog. These two lonely souls embark on a journey together.

After getting out of prison, small-time crook Mardar stumbles upon a woman who looks exactly like his long-lost lover, who he attempted to kidnap 3 years ago.

Two melancholic Hong Kong policemen fall in love: one with a mysterious underworld figure, the other with a beautiful and ethereal server at a late-night restaurant.

In 1923, teenager Kim Shun-Pei moves from Cheju Island, in South Korea, to Osaka, in Japan. Along the years, he becomes a cruel, greedy and violent man and builds a factory of kamaboko, processed seafood products, in his poor Korean-Japanese community exploiting his employees.

When a family of raccoons discover worms living underneath the sod in Jeff and Nealy's backyard, this pest problem begins a darkly comic and wild chain reaction of domestic tension, infidelity and murder.

A second-class horror movie has to be shown at Cannes Film Festival, but, before each screening, the projectionist is killed by a mysterious fellow, with hammer and sickle, just as it happens in the film to be shown.

After a disastrous failure to stop a robber gang, the police attempt to redeem themselves through a series of publicity stunts and shootouts.

An aging Chinese mother suffering from empty nest syndrome gets another chance at motherhood when one of her dumplings springs to life as a lively, giggly dumpling boy.

Four stories... one city. A dark comedy about crime in the big city: EL TORZON - two friends are smoking grass in their car, when they're caught by a corrupt Judicial Police Officer; VIDA EXPRESS - a wealthy businesswoman is kidnapped and her deadbeat husband has to come up with the money; BARBACOA DE CHIVO - an angry mob mistakes a college professor with a burglar and decide to lynch him in front of the church; COMIDA PARA PERROS - a bumbling thief tries to rob a restaurant

Follows a young cyclo driver on his poverty-driven descent into criminality in modern-day Ho Chi Minh City. The boy's struggles to scratch out a living for his two sisters and grandfather in the mean streets of the city lead to petty crime on behalf of a mysterious Madame from whom he rents his cyclo.

A search for love, meaning and bathroom solitude. Danny goes through a series of shared housing experiences in a succession of cities on the east coast of Australia. Together these vignettes form a narrative that is surprisingly reflective.

In 2013, in Cairo, a tragic fate brings together several detainees from different political and social backgrounds inside a police truck, during the turmoil that followed the ousting of president Morsi.

The harmony of a seemingly idyllic neighborhood is disrupted when a dog attacks a young girl.

Shanghai, China, 1930. When young Shuisheng arrives from the countryside, his uncle Liushu puts him at the service of Bijou, the mistress of Laoda, supreme boss of the Tang Triad, constantly threatened by his enemies, both those he knows and those lurking in the shadows.

Three key events during three different time periods, in three seasons, and on three nights culminate to change the life of Zhang Dong Ling.

During the events of May 1968 in France, different worldviews of conflicting relatives collide in their family estate.

A group of student activists travel from New York City to the Amazon to save the rainforest. However, once they arrive in this vast green landscape, they soon discover that they are not alone… and that no good deed goes unpunished.

Due to many reasons, ranging from insecurity to trauma, a group of people have gained a lot of weight in recent times.

Animals on a farm lead a revolution against the farmers to put their destiny in their own hands. However this revolution eats their own children and they cannot avoid corruption.

An African-American man working at a slaughterhouse in the Watts area of Los Angeles leads a dissatisfied and listless existence.

A truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregon wilderness must visit Portland to find the mysterious person who stole his beloved foraging pig.

In the middle of a performance of the play "Le Cocu", a bad boulevard comedy at a Parisian theatre, Yannick gets up and interrupts the show to take the evening back in hand.

Fans flock to a festival celebrating the most iconic horror movies, only to discover that the charismatic showman behind the event has a diabolical agenda.

A group of hobos begin melting into multicolored piles of goo after drinking sixty-year-old liquor. At the same time, the psychotic Vietnam War vet who rules the hobo camp snaps and begins killing at random. Two brothers set out to stop the liquor and the killer.

A debt-ridden wedding planner inadvertently becomes a successful funeral planner. However, he must convince a traditional Taoist priest of his legitimacy to continue operating in the field.

In 1937, during the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Imperial Japanese Army has just captured Nanjing, then-capital of the Republic of China. What followed was known as the Nanking Massacre, or the Rape of Nanking, a six week period wherein tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed.

A 40-year-old loser named Isidoro at the request of his brother drives from Italy to mountainous Carpathian village in Ukraine with a coffin of a diseased Ukrainian worker, who died at a construction site in Italy.

A dachshund passes from oddball owner to oddball owner, whose radically dysfunctional lives are all impacted by the pooch.



