La Route

The literal translation of the title of this film is: The Great Way.

This movie reminds audience an important historical fact: World War II did not begin in 1941 for China, instead, it started a decade ago when Japanese invaded Manchuria, the northeastern part of China.

Yan Jin's mother died on the road when he was an infant. His brother raised him on the road, working at digging and pick axe and dragging the heavy roller to make the road bigger and longer and better. China will benefit because roads mean trade and wealth for everyone. So now he is a young man, a leader in a village that builds the road between cities, and everyone who works with him is his brother and his sister. But not everyone sees the road that way, ad not everyone cares for the people who build the road: not the military, who see the road as a means of moving troops and arms quickly to fight a never-specified enemy, nor the bureaucrats who supervise the road, and are quite willing to kill Jin's family for a bribe.

The copy of the movie I saw was not particularly good, and its late-silent soundtrack is a sometimes thing, of sound effects and shouting, and even two musical numbers. I cannot tell if this is a movie extolling the little guy against the big guy, or if it has a more overtly communist tinge for a 1930s Chinese audience; it's a distant enough world that I am unsure of. However, its director, Yu Sun, continued directing in mainland China until 1960 and died in 1990, aged 90. So I'm pretty sure he could make that case convincingly.