MY MEMORIES OF OLD BEIJING

An associate director of the Shanghai Film Studio, Wu Yigong has written and/or directed 9 feature films. In 1980 his "Evening Rain" won the Ministry of Culture's award for outstanding feature films, the first Golden Rooster Award for Best Feature Film, and a prize for best direction and best film from a leading Shanghai daily. Wu was born in 1938 in Hangzhou in the province oh Zhejiang and graduated from the Beijing Film Institute in 1960. The Shanghai Film Studio has built a reputation for making smaller, more personal films than the other Chinese studios. MY MEMORIES OF BEIJING has universal appeal and is the first Chinese-produced film to be booked internationally in theaters that have non-Chinese audiences. Based on an autobiographical novel by a writer now living in Taiwan, the film recalls a childhood lived in the 1920s in the ancient capital of Peking (Now Beijing). Yingzi (Shen Jie) is a precocious and remarkable sensitive 10-year old girl who tries to understand the injustices she perceives all around her. Politics kept in the background, the story focuses on Yingzi's natural curiosity about the sights and sounds of her new home, nostalgic images heightened by a child's awe, whether for street peddlers selling pinwheels, or the bells signaling the approach of a camel caravan, or an insane woman's repeated calling for his missing daughter or another mother's tears for a daughter sold by her worthless father.