Father is a 2000 Chinese film

Cinema of China

The Chinese-language cinema has three distinct historical threads: Cinema of Hong Kong, Cinema of China, and Cinema of Taiwan. Since 1949 the cinema of mainland China has operated under restrictions imposed by the Communist Party of China's State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television and...

 directed by the writer Wang Shuo

Wang Shuo

Wang Shuo is a Chinese author, director, actor, and cultural icon. He has written over 20 novels, television series and movies. His work has been translated into Japanese, French, English, Italian, and many other languages...

. To date, it is Wang's first and only directorial effort. The film is based on Wang's own novel, Wo Shi Ni Baba (English: I Am Your Father). Despite being partially backed by the state-run Beijing Film Studio, Father suffered from years of bureaucratic red tape. Made in 1996, the film was not screened until 2000, when it surreptitiously premiered at the 2000 Locarno International Film Festival

Locarno International Film Festival

The Film Festival Locarno is an international film festival held annually in the city of Locarno, Switzerland since 1946. After Cannes and Venice and together with Karlovy Vary, Locarno is the Film Festival with the longest history...

.

The films stars the director Feng Xiaogang, who also helped adapt Wang's novel for the screen.

Plot

Father documents the tumultuous relationship between a widowed father, Ma Lisheng, and his school-age son, Ma Che. Though he works as a low-level party functionary during the day, he finds his greatest challenges in the raising of a son on his own. Alternating between trying to bond with his son (even getting drunk with him), and verbally accosting him, Ma is at a loss. One day the son decides that the best way for his father to stop harassing him, will be to find him a new wife, which he finds in the form of the mother of a school friend, Qing Huaiyuan.

Cast

• Feng Xiaogang
  Feng Xiaogang
  Feng Xiaogang , in is a Chinese film director. He is famous in China as being perhaps the most successful "commercialized" filmmaker whose comedy films do consistently well in the box office, although Feng has attempted to break out from that mold by making drama or period drama films...
  
  as Ma Lisheng, a widowed single father living in an old courtyard home with his son, Ma Che. A popular actor and director, Feng Xiaogang also co-wrote the film and is Wang's business partner in the production company, Beijing Good Dreams, which partially produced Father.
• Hu Xiaopei as Ma Che, Ma Lisheng's son.
• Xu Fan as Qi Huaiyuan, the mother of one of Ma Che's school friends.
• Qin Yan as Xia Jingping.
• Wang Weining as Xia Qing.
• Ye Qing as Tie Jun, Qi Huaiyuan's daughter.

Reception

Never officially released in China, Father was not screened in the west until four years after its completion in February 1996. The film was smuggled into Switzerland for the Locarno International Film Festival

Locarno International Film Festival

The Film Festival Locarno is an international film festival held annually in the city of Locarno, Switzerland since 1946. After Cannes and Venice and together with Karlovy Vary, Locarno is the Film Festival with the longest history...

 by the festival director Marco Muller, and would go on to win that festival's top prize, the Golden Leopard. The festival's jury chairman, Naum Klejman described Wang Shuo's film as "not only a very important film in the context of new cinema, in China and all over the world, it's also a film which gives a very human explanation of developing the societies in the world, it's universal."

Many critics, however, gave only measured praise. Derek Elley of Variety wrote that the film's two-part structure (the drama of the father-son relationship versus the broader comedy of the romance between Ma Lingyuan and Qi Huaiyuan) left the film a "little uneven in tone...," ultimately "los[ing] its focus in the final reels."

External links

• Father at the Chinese Movie Database