Shanghai, 1937: one warehouse stands in the middle of a battlefield, and eight hundred Chinese soldiers are inside it. The Eight Hundred, directed by Guan Hu and released in 2020, is a Chinese war film built around that single besieged building.
What is The Eight Hundred about?
The setting never moves far. A force of eight hundred Chinese soldiers has taken up position in a warehouse while the fighting for Shanghai goes on around them, and the Japanese army has closed the ring on every side. There is no open road out and no easy way for help to come in. The film stays with the defenders as the siege tightens, following how men hold a position when they are completely surrounded and what each day inside those walls demands of them.
About the cast
The ensemble is large, as a story about hundreds of soldiers requires. Wang Qian-Yuan and Zhang Yi open the cast list, followed by Huang Zhizhong, Jiang Wu, Oho Ou, Du Chun, Vision Wei and Tang Yixin. Behind the camera is Guan Hu, the filmmaker also known for Mr. Six.
Context & significance
Four genre tags are attached to The Eight Hundred: action, drama, historical and war. The historical anchor is the year 1937 and the battle for Shanghai; the action comes from the siege itself; the drama comes from the soldiers confined together under fire. With a running time of 147 minutes, close to two and a half hours, it is a long film even by the standards of war epics, and that length is spent almost entirely on one location and one stretch of fighting. It is a production of China, and its director Guan Hu is also the name behind Mr. Six. On K-Time the film is listed under the Persian title «هشتصد» and is available with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, which matters for a picture carrying this many characters and this much dialogue.
Watching The Eight Hundred on Ktime
Anyone can read this page. To watch the film itself, log in with a K-Time account. K-Time serves the Iranian diaspora with Persian-focused streaming, and the Farsi interface lets you look the film up under either title and choose the dubbed or the subtitled track before pressing play.