One year before Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000), 19-year-old dance student Zhang Ziyi made her theatrical film debut for the most acclaimed director in China.

THE ROAD HOME (1999) may be the simplest, most intimate film Zhang Yimou, director of Raise the Red Lantern (1991), ever made. It is beautiful and aching and powerful in its minimalism.

A son returns to his village for his father's funeral. His mother refuses a truck. She wants her husband carried back on foot, honoring the old belief that a body returned this way will never forget the road home.

As the son gathers the men to carry the coffin, the film remembers how his parents met: a village girl, and the young teacher who came to build the school. Zhang shoots the present in black and white. Memory gets the color.

Cannes never showed it. The director had his films pulled from the festival in a public dispute, citing bias against productions from Communist China. He then answered with a Golden Lion at Venice for Not One Less (1999) and a Silver Bear at Berlin for this.

And by the end of the following year, Zhang Ziyi's face would become one of the most famous in the world.