The Road Home

Luo Yusheng is a businessman living in the city who returns to his home village in northern China after his father, the local schoolteacher, dies. His elderly mother insists that the funeral follow the old customs, including having the coffin carried back from the hospital to the village. Yusheng at first finds her devotion to the rituals hard to understand, but he comes to see how much the traditions mean to her and to the other villagers. Much of the film unfolds in flashback, tracing how his parents met and married.

Zhang Yimou directed The Road Home, the eighth of the twenty-five features he has made, following Not One Less and preceding Hero. Shi Bao wrote the screenplay, Yu Zhao produced, and the cast includes Zhang Ziyi as the young Zhao Di, Zheng Hao as Luo Changyu, Yulian Zhao as the older Zhao Di, Sun Honglei as Luo Yusheng, Bin Li and Song Yuncheng. Made on a budget of about one million dollars, it took roughly seven million dollars worldwide.

Audience responses are positive and close to each other, with a rating of 7.7 from 15,000 votes on IMDb and 7.4 from 238 votes on TMDB. A critics' rating of 7.9 from 80 reviews places professional assessments slightly above the audience scores.