The Blue Kite
푸른 연 (영화)
A Chinese film completed by Tian Zhuangzhuang in 1993. Through the eyes of the Beijing boy Tietou it shows his mother's three husbands falling in turn to the Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese government banned it and barred the director from filmmaking. It won the Tokyo Grand Prix that year.
In depth
What is the story?
A narrow Beijing courtyard in the early 1950s. The librarian Lin Shaolong and the teacher Chen Shujuan marry to the whole neighbourhood's joy and have a son, Tietou ("Iron Head"). The father makes the boy a blue kite.
Part one, "Father": his workplace must find a rightist to meet the quota. Lin steps out to the bathroom and returns to find every eye on him. He is sent to a labour camp, and only a letter comes back, saying he was killed by a falling tree. Part two, "Uncle": his colleague Li Guodong, coerced into testifying against him, tends mother and son in guilt, marries her and dies in the malnutrition of the Great Leap Forward. Part three, "Stepfather": to survive she enters a loveless marriage with the party official Lao Wu. The Cultural Revolution breaks out and Red Guards storm in. The stepfather dies of a heart attack, the mother is dragged away, and beaten Tietou lies looking up at a torn blue kite in a tree. His fate is left unknown.
Why was it so firmly banned?
The film shows directly how one political campaign after another breaks a family, more directly, in one assessment, than Farewell My Concubine or To Live. When it took the Tokyo prize, the Chinese delegation withdrew from the festival in protest. Tian came from a film family, the son of the actors Tian Fang and Yu Lan.
Sources disagree on the ban. The Chinese Wikipedia speaks of eight years; the English Wikipedia speaks of a ten-year ban yet also says it lasted officially until 1996. What is clear is that he made no further film until Springtime in a Small Town (2001), working meanwhile as a producer for younger directors.
How is it judged?
It won high praise abroad: top prizes at Tokyo and Hawaii in 1993, and best actress for Lü Liping at Tokyo. Roger Ebert put it in his Great Movies, calling it a profoundly political film that achieves its purpose by indirection. The scholar Xudong Zhang places it within post-Tiananmen cinema's effort to reclaim national memory through personal and family suffering. It could not be released in mainland China.