King of the Children

A young man sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, himself barely schooled, is taken off his work detail and put into a nearby village school as a teacher. There are hardly any books in the classroom and most of the students can barely read. After a while he sets Mao's textbook aside and asks the children to write about their own lives and what they actually feel. Chen Kaige adapted the film from Ah Cheng's novella of the same name. The telling is extremely calm; what is described is not an event but a teacher deciding for himself what to teach, which in that period was a matter in itself. It was produced by the Xi'an Film Studio. It competed at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988. It is one of the important works of China's fifth generation.