The one that made me want to be an outlaw

Bonnie and Clyde

Arthur Penn (1967)

I grew up in a really isolated village in China where it was all about tradition, morality and everything you can't do. Bonnie and Clyde was one of the first films I saw after leaving for Beijing. I was 19 and yearning for love and attention and freedom, and robbing banks didn't seem like a terrible idea. Seeing these two beautiful outlaws being lovers and travelling and breaking the law filled me with energy.

Those that resonate with my vision of love

Hiroshima mon amour

Alain Resnais (1959)

I vividly remember the beauty of the French woman and the Japanese man, and how the film switches from their naked, beautiful bodies to images of the war. The film resonates with my vision of love as an abstract thing that lives in the memory rather than in reality.

Happy Together

Wong Kar-Wai (1997)

This is classified as a gay film but it is more generally about how love can be ravaged and ruined by reality, especially when the lovers' existence is as bleak as it is here. All my novels and films are really about this: dispossession and yearning for love. Each time I watch this film, my tears come out at the moment when Leslie Cheung has an argument with his boyfriend after they make love in their Buenos Aires basement, and at the final scene at Iguazú Falls, scored by the most beautiful music.

The one that speaks to me of Chinese women

Shen Nu (The Goddess)

Yonggang Wu (1934)

A classic Chinese film about a beautiful prostitute in 1930s Shanghai. She is played by Lingyu Ruan, who committed suicide soon after because of vicious newspaper gossip about her private life. It is about the fracturing effect a moral society can have on women. It's extremely subtle. You don't see the prostitution act. Instead, you see her high heels walking around at night. Then she comes home and you see she has a man and a baby. Young educated women now play very significant roles in the big cities in China, but in the provinces women are still really suppressed.

The one that had a big influence on my work

Vivre sa vie

Jean-Luc Godard (1962)

My recent book, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, about a young woman's life in Beijing, is partly inspired by this film. Divided into 12 chapters, it follows a young woman called Nana who is beautiful, wild, romantic, dreamy and totally lost. This woman, and the film's nervous, fragmentary style, have had a strong influence on my work.

The one that chilled me to the core

Twentynine Palms

Bruno Dumont (2003)

Not many people have seen this film, but it's so powerful. The whole film is just two normal lovers spending their boring holiday in Palm Springs, travelling around and making love. But then it shows the profound violence of their sexuality. I was completely chilled by the view of alienation in our postmodern society. It shadowed my heart for days.

The one that shows up shallow Hollywood

La jetée

Chris Marker (1962)

I'm very interested in narratives made up of broken memories, like mosaics, and this is a perfect example, composed of black-and-white stills. The way it plays with time and how we tell stories is so imaginative and authentic, it reflects how shallow and boring Hollywood films are. They steal ideas from a film like this and feed them into extremely mediocre narratives.

The one to impress me most recently

Antichrist

Lars von Trier (2009)

A very hard film to watch and take inside, but it deals brilliantly with issues of possession and trust between lovers, such important themes. A lot of people hated it, but they have such a creamy, cake-like taste. They just want a nice two hours in the cinema. It's a bitter film. It disturbs me, but it's the kind I'd recommend.

• A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was nominated for the 2007 Orange Prize. Her documentary Once Upon a Time Proletarian is currently screening at international film festivals. Her feature film She, A Chinese won the Golden Leopard at the 2009 Locarno film festival