The Chinese Widow
2017 film by Bille August
The Chinese Widow (Chinese: 烽火芳菲), also known as In Harm's Way and The Hidden Soldier, is a 2017 Chinese war drama film directed by Danish director Bille August, starring Liu Yifei and Emile Hirsch. The film premiered at the 2017 Shanghai International Film Festival as the opening film and was released on 10 November 2017 in mainland China.
Plot
Jack is a United States Army Air Forces pilot assigned to carry out the first US bombing run on Tokyo. After the mission succeeds, his plane is separated from the rest of the squadron due to bad weather. Running on low fuel, he is forced to fly towards China's Zhejiang Province. Due to a malfunctioning autopilot, he is forced to fly the plane manually while his crew parachutes out and he jumps out in the last moment before the plane crashes.
The next day, his unconscious body is discovered by a local widow named Ying, who lives with her daughter Nunu weaving silk. She hides him in a nearby cave with the help of her childhood friend and village head, Kai. Soon after, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA), who have already captured and executed the rest of Jack's crew, come in search of Jack and capture the village. They hold Kai at gunpoint, demanding to know where the pilot is hiding.
The public source identifies “The Chinese Widow” as 2017 film by Bille August. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chinese, Widow and film.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q30336064. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Chinese Widow” 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.