Strand Releasing: New 4K Restoration of Suzhou River Heading to Blu-ray

Strand Releasing is preparing a Blu-ray release of Lou Ye's Suzhou River (2000). The release is scheduled to arrive on the market on March 21.

Label description: Along the banks of the Suzhou River, which winds precariously through Shanghai, Mardar (Jia Hongshen) falls in love with a dramatically beautiful young woman named Moudan (Zhou Xun). When he tries to kidnap her in order to demand ransom money from her rich father, she escapes him, jumping in to the river and disappearing forever. Mardar serves a three-year jail sentence for his attempted crime. Upon his release, he meets a woman that looks exactly like Moudan, named MeiMei (also played by Zhou Xun).

An exciting, action-filled mystery suspense movie, director Lou Ye's SUZHOU RIVER shares many thematic and stylistic elements with Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO.

ABOUT THE RESTORATION: The 4K digital restoration of the original version of Suzhou River was realized starting from the original 16mm A-B negative of the image from the laboratory Kopierwerk Babelsberg, all supervised by director Lou Ye himself. The image was scanned by screenshot AG Berlin, dust-busted at The Post Republic and color-graded by Moritz Peters. Titles were rebuilt by Mieke Ulfig.

The soundtrack was restored at Basis Berlin Postproduktion GmbH. New foleys were recorded by Fabien Weigmann and Jonathan Ritzel, the sound design was recreated and additional sound effects added by Sebastian Tesch. The dolby 5.1 mix was mastered by Ansgar Frerich and Sebastian Tesch.