One Second (film)
2019 Chinese film directed by Zhang Yimou

One Second (Chinese: 一秒钟) is a 2020 drama film directed by Zhang Yimou, about a man who escapes from a Laogai camp during the Cultural Revolution. The film is co-produced by China and Hong Kong, and based on the novel The Criminal Lu Yanshi, by author Geling Yan. Yan is not credited in the film, which has led to controversy.
Plot
In 1969, during China's Cultural Revolution, a man known only as "the fugitive" is sent to a remote labor reform camp in northwestern China after clashing with a rebel faction leader. His wife divorces him, and his daughter severs ties. In 1975, he learns that his 14-year-old daughter died in an accident while participating in a school labor activity, her efforts captured in Issue No. 22 of the News Bulletin. Desperate to see her one last time, he escapes the camp in hopes of catching the reel at a rural screening.
At the second farm division, an orphan named Liu and her younger brother struggle to survive after their mother dies and their father abandons them. In a bid to replace a burned lampshade made from film, Liu steals a reel of Heroic Sons and Daughters.
“One Second (film)” enters the record as 2019 Chinese film directed by Zhang Yimou. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Second, film and Chinese can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60686176. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1969 and 1975.
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This entry incorporates text from “One Second (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.