Mama
- -Often cited as China’s first independent feature film, this low-budget drama, filmed largely in the director’s Beijing apartment, depicts the life of a single mother (a topic considered taboo at the time) caring for her mentally challenged son. Shot with a documentary aesthetic that includes interviews with families of mentally challenged persons, the film helped kick-start the Sixth Generation of filmmakers (including Wang Xiaoshuai and Jia Zhangke) and their ethos of employing documentary realism to depict the true conditions of contemporary China.
Photos
Storyline
Details
Box Office
Company Credits
Technical Specs
Often cited as China’s first independent feature film, this low-budget drama, filmed largely in the director’s Beijing apartment, depicts the life of a single mother (a topic considered taboo at the time) caring for her mentally challenged son.
Mama is a 1990 Chinese film directed by Zhang Yuan. Zhang Yuan’s directorial debut, Mama is now considered a seminal film in the history of Chinese independent cinema, and by extension, as a pioneering film of the Sixth Generation of which Zhang is a member. Shot on an extreme budget within Zhang Yuan’s apartment, Mama, follows the story of a mother and her grown mentally challenged son.
The film focuses on a librarian struggling to raise her mentally handicapped son in modern-day Beijing while at the same time dealing with an absent and unresponsive husband. The story garnered much criticism from state-censors, who found the film too dark.
While the film was originally written to end on the dour note of the mother euthanizing her son, director Zhang Yuan eventually opted for a more open-ended and ambiguous conclusion. [Wikipedia]