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Father documents the tumultuous relationship between a widowed father, Ma Lisheng, and his school-age son, Ma Che. Though he works as a low-level party functionary during the day, he finds his greatest challenges in the raising of a son on his own. Alternating between trying to bond with his son (even getting drunk with him), and verbally accosting him, Ma is at a loss. One day the son decides that the best way for his father to stop harassing him, will be to find him a new wife, which he finds in the form of the mother of a school friend, Qing Huaiyuan.
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Shan Que'er loves blacksmith Tie Tou, but her mother wants her to marry Qiang Er, the son of a rich family.
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With the birth of New China, a husband-and-wife pair of Overseas Chinese painters resolve to return to the embrace of their motherland, and their child is born under the five-starred red flag. But these Overseas Chinese patriots are persecuted in various political campaigns and their daughter subject to discrimination from childhood. The male lead freezes to death as a fugitive and draws a giant question mark in the snow before dying. The daughter emigrates following the Cultural Revolution; when her relatives try to stop her, she says: "You love the motherland, but does the motherland love you?" Based on a script by Bai Hua, SUN AND MAN was completed in 1981 but permanently shelved following high-level criticism and a public campaign against its "anti-Party" character. The film is said to survive in the studio archive but has never been publicly screened. A Taiwanese adaptation of the script (with some modifications) was released in 1982 under the English title PORTRAIT OF A FANATIC.
