The Winter of Three Hairs

Sanmao is the hero of a Chinese comic strip that began appearing in 1935 and was carried on for decades afterwards. The character is an orphan boy trying to live on his own in the streets of Shanghai. The film brings him to the screen: hunger, cold, the search for somewhere to spend the night and the people met on the street. The account sets pain inside comedy; the small solutions the boy finds are funny and hurt at the same time. Poverty is shown not as fate but as the result of how the city is arranged. The shoot was finished in 1949, while power was changing hands in Shanghai, and a parade ending was added to the film afterwards. Zhang Leping created the comic strip and Wang Longji plays Sanmao. The seventy four minute Chinese film by Zhao Ming and Gong Yan was completed in 1949.