I Sailed With Chinese Pirates
by Aleko Lilius

The Pearl River Delta in the 1920s was a lawless place, with bands of pirates hijacking ships, kidnapping villagers, and extorting money from fishing fleets – when they weren’t hiding out in opium dens and gambling houses in Macau. In those days, when “adventurer” was still considered a profession, Finnish-American Aleko Lilius described his dramatic journey aboard a heavily armed pirate junk and his imprisonment in a Hong Kong jail.

In an alleyway in Weigongcun, three brothers from Anhui weathered the worst days of the financial crisis with their bottle collection business. The small patch that serves as their headquarters is filled with thousands of bottles sending up a terrific stench in the scorching summer weather. Students with huge bags line up outside, waiting to dump their bottles.

The Jiang brothers pay RMB 50,000 a year for their small space and the government license that allows them to recycle. They face fierce competition from unlicensed mobile recyclers, but still, the brothers are beginning to thrive. Summer has arrived, and with it a sharp increase in the number of bottles. They responded to our interview while furiously counting thousands of bottles, throwing them all into an enormous sack on a small truck nearby.

The Burning Plain

Guillermo Arriaga must enjoy pain – his characters live in a world of it. The director of 21 Grams and Amores Perros strikes again with another spectacularly chilling, emotional wasp’s nest of a film. The three separate stories of love, sin, and redemption woven together in The Burning Plain hash out nightmarish tragedies of the heart that are too extreme for reality, yet too close to home to feel contrived. Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger and the very talented young Jennifer Lawrence all give mesmerizing performances. EW