Better Days: The Award-Winning Chinese Drama That Won the Oscar for Best International Film

There is a particular kind of film — rare, necessary, and impossible to shake — that bears witness to the suffering of young people with such honesty and such compassion that it becomes something more than entertainment. Better Days (少年的你) is that film. Winner of the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, this devastating and beautiful Chinese drama about school bullying, survival, and an unlikely alliance between two vulnerable young people is one of the most essential films of the past decade.

The Story: An Alliance Born of Necessity

Chen Nian is a high school student — brilliant, quietly intense, and already living under enormous academic pressure. When she witnesses the aftermath of a classmate's suicide following sustained bullying, she becomes the next target of the school's bullies — a calculated punishment for not pretending not to see.

Xiao Bei is outside that world entirely — a young delinquent living on the streets, hardened by a childhood entirely without safeguards, whose apparent toughness is the armor built over injuries that never fully healed.

Their meeting is accidental. Their alliance, that he will protect her until her college exams are over, is transactional. But in the specific, peculiar conditions of their lives — two people who have been failed by every system designed to protect them, finding in each other the only witness to their genuine situation — something that cannot be called simply contractual develops.

Better Days is unflinching in its depiction of how sustained cruelty operates —the way institutional systems fail to see it, the way social hierarchies enforce it, the way victims are silenced. But it is equally attentive to the specific private humanity that persists in people who exist under that cruelty.

Zhou Dongyu and Jackson Yee: Two Great Performances

Zhou Dongyu, one of China's most acclaimed actresses, gives in Better Days what may be the defining performance of her career — physically diminished, emotionally contained, and devastating in her precision. Jackson Yee (Yi Yang Qianxi), known internationally for his music career as a member of TFBoys, reveals in Better Days that he is a film actor of remarkable range and depth.

Their scenes together have the quality of complete authenticity — two people who understand each other across all barriers because shared vulnerability has made them more known to each other than anyone else in their lives.

The Oscar and What It Means

The Academy Award for Best International Feature Film is the film's deserved recognition, but it also represents something larger: the global film audience's acknowledgement that stories from China, told in Chinese, about Chinese young people's specific social experiences, can be universally true.

Where to Watch

Better Days is streaming on Netflix and other major platforms.

Find Streaming Links for Better Days 2019→