In what Ronnie O’Sullivan described as the “greatest comeback in the history of the Sheffield venue,” Luca Betel beat Si Jiahui 17-15 last week in the semi-finals of the World Snooker Championship. The Crucible match was all the more extraordinary because Jiahui, who was ranked 80th at the beginning of the month, is just 20 years old. The Chinese wunderkind’s history-blazing path is a story of national pride (unlike the 10 Chinese snooker players who got banned in January from the tournament because they were charged with match-fixing).
Jiahui’s meteoric journey echoes the increasing popularity of billiards/snooker in the PRC. The sport emerged in China in the 1980s. At the turn of the century, China hosted its first international snooker tournament. The early aughts witnessed the arrival of Ding “Enter the Dragon” Junhui, who became the world’s top player in 2014. Other stars followed, such as Pan Xiaoting, Liang Wenbo, and Yan Bingtao.
Today, over 120 million people play and practice billiards in China. There are 1500 snooker clubs in Shanghai; another 1200 are in Beijing. At the World Snooker College, the only subject taught is snooker, with every student hoping to be the next Ding Junhui (or maybe now Si Jiahui).
Not surprisingly, the swelling popularity of billiards has extended from the baize to the silver screen. In fact, prior to 2010, I’m not aware of a single Chinese billiards film. But, since that time, I’ve discovered eight Chinese billiards movies.1,2
The problem is that, with the exception of A Magic Stick (2016), they cannot be found, at least not by yours truly, or they can be found, but have no subtitles, making them incomprehensible to me. Talk about a billiards movie gap in my corpus! I officially deem these Chinese billiards movies WANTED, and I beseech any reader to help me find them. Please note some of the titles below may be approximate translations from the original Mandarin.
Color Disorder (2010)
Color Disorder (or Color Barrier, perhaps) is a Chinese film about Chai Lu, a naturally gifted billiards player who lacks drive and ambition. At some point, he meets Chang Jianguo, who sees Chai Lu’s true potential. He takes Chai Lu under his wing and prepares him for the National Amateur Billiards “Golden Stone Competition.” While Chai Lu is suspicious at first, at the behest of his girlfriend Meng Rui, he ultimately grows to trust Chang Jianguo and his disciplined billiards teaching style.
Billiards Baby (2013)
Directed by Xie Yihang, this billiards short film is about Zhang Chao and Si Yu, who met one summer as kids and became good friends and lovers as adults. They live in Beijing, where Si Yu relies on the billiards skills she learned from her grandfather.
Midnight Pool Room (2016)
Just 11 minutes, the macabre Midnight Pool Room is about Huang and Liu, who hate the wealthy, so they launch some kind of sinister snooker game to retaliate and make the rich taste the shame they deserve. Sounds like The Menu meets The Hustler. I’m in!
Billiard Girl (2018)
In 2018, Xiao Liu directed the 95-minute youth film Billiard Girl. This Chinese billiards movie focuses on Ling Chun (YiYi Deng, who won a Best Actress Lily Award award for the role), a high school student who lives with her stepmother. Ling Chun has always felt unsatisfied with her life, until one day she plays billiards and everything changes. More than a couple reviewers criticized the lack of billiards realism. Maybe they were reacting to the blindfolded shot I saw in an online clip? The complete movie is available to watch online, but there are no English subtitles, unfortunately.
Sasha (2018)
Continuing 2018’s focus on young female billiards players is Chunze Dong’s rom-com Sasha. The movie tells the story of Zhao Shasha, a small-town hotel family’s daughter, who is a billiards genius. She flees to Beijing with Liu Hongyang, a simple, everyday, kind of homely man who dotes on her. At some point, she gets smitten by a hunky gent named Abu, forcing our teen billiards goddess to choose between Mr. Funny, Loyal and Ugly and Mr. Tall, Rich and Handsome. A Chinese trailer of the film is available to watch here.
Metal Billiards (2019)
Among this septet of missing Chinese billiards movies, my list-topper is Bai Xinyu’s 2019 billiards drama Metal Billiards (or Alloy Billiards). The film focuses on Lu Yan, an industrial design student, who creates a robotic arm to give more freedom and mobility to its user. Though he fancies himself a real-world Tony Stark, the invention is dismissed by various companies, and Lu Yan graduates unemployed. At this time, he also receives news that his father is hospitalized, having been injured over a large gambling debt. Lu Yan realizes that his robotic arm provides him a great advantage in billiards, specifically in determining the perfect angles and physics at which to make shots. With his robotic appendage, he can avenge his father and demonstrate that his time as an otaku was not for naught.
While the Metal Billiards trailer is no longer on YouTube, there are some extended clips available to watch on Chinese sites. These clips show that, irrespective of the plot, the movie has a hip design aesthetic and traffics in comically memorable billiards opponents, including a green-mohawked guy tattooed top to bottom, a pair of buxom vixens in French maid outfits, an obese woman with hair curlers who carries a pig’s head on a rope (?!), and some gargantuan yeti whose cue stick is appended with a sinister metal chain. Only ones missing from this Iron Man rogue gallery is Obadiah Stane with a cue stick and, of course, the Mandarin.
Billiards King of Northeast China (2023)
Just released in April, Billiards King of Northeast China (also possibly known as Northeast Champion or Northeast Ball King) is a rom-com from director Yin Bo. The film is about a rural billiards prodigy named Zhou Dafa who solves a kidnapping crisis, gets introduced to a business kingpin, falls in love, and then faces another crisis when the kingpin asks him to throw a billiards championship match or risk harm to his mother. Supposedly, Scottish snooker pro Stephen Hendry, who appeared in the 2017 TV documentary Enter the Dragon: China’s Snooker Star (about Ding Jinhui), makes a cameo in the film.
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- Of course, some of this jump is attributable to the skyrocketing output of China’s movie studios. In 2000, China released just 91 films; by 2018, the number was 902 (source: ChinaPower).
- This excludes movies made in Taiwan (e.g., Second Chance) or Hong Kong (e.g., Legend of the Dragon; The King of Snooker). I am focusing solely on the PRC.
