(France/China, 2002, 110 min., Mandarin w/ES)
Director: Dai Sijie
Based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Dai Sijie, who also wrote the screenplay and directed this film, and set in the People’s Republic of China in 1971 during the Cultural Revolution. Two university students are sent to a remote mining village in the mountains for three years of “re-education” to purge them of their bourgeois backgrounds and education. The boys struggle with the menial labor but are saved from their bleak existence by playing music, reading forbidden books by Balzac and other Western writers – and both falling in love with “Little Seamstress,” the illiterate granddaughter of a local tailor. This seemingly simple story reveals the power that art and literature can play in even the most unlikely of situations. It’s also a very personal, often humorous glimpse into the modern “dark age” of Chinese repression, when crimes such as reading or even thinking differently were harshly punished.
