Synopsis
Better Days (少年的你, 2019) is Derek Tsang's Chinese crime drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Honor student Chen Nian is grinding toward the gaokao, the exam that will decide her entire future, when she becomes the next target of brutal classroom bullying.
Nian studies around the clock because a top score is her one way out of poverty, away from a mother dodging debt collectors. After a classmate jumps from a school rooftop, the cruelty turns on Nian herself. Her only shield is Xiao Bei, a rootless street kid with no home and no prospects. Zhou Dongyu and Jackson Yee, of pop group TFBOYS, play the bond between two damaged teenagers without any sweetening. What links them grows out of shared pain, not romance.
The film earned an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature in 2021, rare ground for a mainland Chinese production. Tsang shoots the bullying and exam pressure up close, the camera rarely leaving the leads' faces. It's a hard, honest look at two kids trying to protect each other in a world that won't. Stream Better Days (2019) online on iFILM.
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