Lan Fengzeng

At once a family drama and a coming-of-age story that spans the years 1949 to 1967, the film tells how thirteen-year-old Tietou (“Iron Head”) is raised by his young mother, Chen Shujuan, who has had three marriages. A primary school teacher, Chen first marries a librarian who is later branded a rightist and sent to a “reform camp” where he dies from an accident. His colleague, Li Guodong, who unwilling informed on him, marries Chen out of guilt. But soon after the marriage, he also dies from weak health, the result of a widespread famine across the country in the late Fifties. Chen once again remarries, this time to a government official who also meets his fate at the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966…