China Film Journal

The famed Chinese film director died on October 18 at the age of 85. The International Herald Tribune said this about Xie’s life during the Cultural Revolution. <blockquote>Xie himself was targeted during the Cultural Revolution, his 1964 film “Stage Sisters” attacked because it “advocated the reconciliation of social classes.”

Xie recalled in the 2002 interview that his parents committed suicide amid the political pressure — his mother jumping off a building and his father overdosing on sleeping pills — and he had to collect their bodies himself.

Xie was also denounced at a rally attended by more than 100,000 people.

Top young Chinese director Jia Zhangke said it was still risky for Xie to make films about the period in the 1980s, when China had started to open up and implement economic reforms.

“He was very bold, he had a rebellious spirit for that time,” said Jia, whose movies were also once banned.

Not surprisingly, Xinhua mentioned that Xie’s films tackled the Cultural Revolution but never mentioned what he himself experienced.

6th generation director Jia Zhangke mentioned that he had recently talked to Xie and that Xie had always been quite supportive of his films. He also said that he hoped to give the old man a bottle of maotai to take over to the next world, since that was Xie’s poison of choice.

Xie’s Chinese movie database (Chinese language IMDB) page is here.

So you might have heard that Jackie Chan recently went to Australia to bury his father, who died of cancer at the age of 93.Well, what you might not have known is that Jackie Chan’s father Charlie, aka Fang Daolong, had a whole other family (Jackie’s mother was his second wife) that he lost touch with and then had to leave behind in 1949. There was an article called “Enter the Parents” written a few years ago that gave some of the background. The video above covers some of the same ground, but was made more recently, as it mentions the thorny issue of why Jackie doesn’t want to get in touch with his half-brothers Fang Shisheng and Fang Shide, especially when their father died and there was a funeral to attend. The interviews also broach the question of whether or not they are revealing their identities so openly now in hoping of getting some of Jackie’s (and his father’s) money. To this question they reply that it would be a lie to say that they aren’t hoping for some help (university tuition, jobs for the young uns) but are NOT coveting Jackie’s wealth. The video is in Chinese.