In the Heat of the Sun

Set in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, In the Heat of the Sun follows a teenage boy nicknamed Monkey and his friends. With schools closed and most adults sent away to the provinces or kept busy by the political campaign, the boys are left largely on their own. They roam the city, join street gangs, get into fights and test the boundaries of their freedom, while Monkey also has to deal with the confusion of first love. A middle-aged narrator looks back on those months and on the friendships and infatuations that marked his passage into adulthood. Jiang Wen directed and wrote the film, his first time behind the camera, and it stars Xia Yu as Ma Xiaojun, Ning Jing as Mi Lan, Geng Le, Hong Tao, Siqin Gaowa and Wang Xueqi.

Released in 1994 and running 141 minutes, the film is a drama with romantic elements, made in Hong Kong and mainland China. It holds an 8 out of 10 rating on IMDb from roughly 6,200 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.8 from about 148 votes, showing a strong and fairly consistent response from viewers across both platforms despite the wide gap in how many people voted. The film stands at the start of Jiang Wen's directing career, before the features he went on to make in the decades that followed.