Peng Xiaolian

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Peng Xiaolian (彭小莲) was a Chinese film director, writer, and author. She was born on June 26, 1953, in Chaling County, Hunan, and grew up in Shanghai. She studied directing at the Beijing Film Academy and became part of China’s Fifth Generation, though her style was different from many of her peers.

Her family life was troubled by politics. Her father, Peng Baishan, was a government official who was persecuted during the Hu Feng affair and died in 1968. Her mother also suffered under the Cultural Revolution. Peng spent about nine years in the countryside during that era. She later returned to film work and began studying at the Beijing Film Academy in 1978, graduating in 1982.

Peng started directing at Shanghai Film Studio. Her first big success was Me and My Classmates (1985), which won the Best Children's Film Award at the Golden Rooster Awards in 1987. She followed with Women’s Story (1988), praised for its focus on rural Chinese women. In 1989 she won a Rotterdam script prize for Difficult Truth, but the film could not be made in China. She then received a Rockefeller fellowship to study at New York University, where she earned an MFA in 1996, although she did not make films there.

Back in China, Peng co-wrote the script for My Daddy and, with Zhu Bin, directed The Dog Homicide (1996). She became well known for films about Shanghai. Once Upon a Time in Shanghai (1998) won the Huabiao Best Picture Award. Shanghai Women (2002) looked at life in a fast-changing city. Shanghai Story (2004) followed a bourgeois family from the 1920s to the 1990s and won several Golden Rooster Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture. Shanghai Rumba (2006) explored the romance of film stars Zhao Dan and Huang Zongying. She also made the children's animation Keke’s Magic Umbrella (2000). In 2009 she co-directed Storm Under the Sun, a documentary about the Hu Feng affair, interviewing many people who had been denounced.

Peng was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. She planned to write about her father and his era and worked on other projects, but her health declined in 2018. She passed away on June 19, 2019, in Shanghai at the age of 65.