User Reviews

This film feels like a documentary, but isn't, quite. The actors all generally play themselves in their own lives, at the original locations with natural light. The story is of a group of Chinese workers in Shanghai who are laid off by the various companies that they worked for. They form a construction company using some savings and lots of borrowed money, and find the business to have some rather significant ups and downs. There are numerous humorous scenes, such as when they decide to save money by moving some boards to an upper floor apartment themselves, and then find that the boards are too long to be taken up the stairs (their solution is funny, but exhausting). The down moments are also done well, but are somewhat difficult to watch since by then you find yourself rooting for them to succeed.

The look of the film is of a documentary, with extensive if not exclusive use of handheld cameras, but it was shot on film rather than video.

I saw this at the San Francisco International Film Festival on 4/28/2002, where an earlier showing was the U.S. premiere.

The literal translation of the title is: Horizontal, vertical, horizontal.

The movie is based on the true story, which has a happy ending, which is extremely rare in real life. Many people with similar fate tried the same thing these actors did (actually, these are not professional actors, but real people playing themselves), but most of the time, they failed after small initial success just like the way described in the movie, but in real life, that disaster would be enough to crash them to the point of beyond recovery.