Christopher Mitchum

Two natural disasters frame a story of a mother, her children and a painful decision that scars them forever in this grand-scale drama from China.

This documentary examines America's bloody post-Civil War Reconstruction, when profiteers swept in to exploit the power vacuum in the South.

Tangshan, 1976. Two seven-year-old twins are buried under the rubble of the deadliest earthquake of the 20th century. The rescue team explains to their mother that freeing either child will almost certainly result in the death of the other. Forced to make the most difficult decision of her life, she finally chooses to save her son. Though left behind as dead, the little girl miraculously survives, unbeknownst to her brother and mother. AFTERSHOCK follows the family on their separate journeys over the course of the next 32 years, as they build lives forever shadowed by the traumatic experience of the earthquake, and eventually face each other—and the decisions of the past. Featuring an all-star cast including Jingchu Zhang (Rush Hour 3) and Daoming Chen (Hero), AFTERSHOCK broke all box-office records in China with its powerful exploration of how one moment can change a family’s life forever.

In the decades after her mother chooses to save her brother and leave her to die following an earthquake, a girl struggles to rebuild her life.