Peng Xiaolian

Peng Xiaolian (; 26 June 1953 – 19 June 2019) was a Chinese film director, scriptwriter and author. A graduate of the 1982 class of the Beijing Film Academy, she was a member of the Fifth Generation, although her style differed from the other members of this group. She was the youngest daughter of (1910–1968) and his wife Zhu Weiming. As a young child she experienced the terror of political persecution of her father. the 1997 short story "To That Faraway Place", and in the 2009 documentary Storm under the Sun that she co-directed with Louisa Wei.

When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, her mother began to suffer brutality from the Red Guards. the novella "Holding up the Book I Read Everyday" and the novella "Childhood: Secrets of Four Seasons".

Like millions of her generation, she was sent down to the countryside for "re-education" by peasants during the Cultural Revolution. Although she spent nine years in the countryside of Jiangxi province,

After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Peng entered Beijing Film Academy in 1978 to study directing, together with Li Shaohong, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang and others, who would later be known as China's Fifth Generation film directors.

Career Directorial debut Upon graduation from Beijing Film Academy in 1982, Peng was assigned to work at Shanghai Film Studio, The film was a success and won the Best Children's Film Award of the 1987 Golden Rooster Awards.

Life in New York In 1989, Peng won a script award for her script "Difficult Truth" at Rotterdam Film Festival, but could not make the film in China due to the tightening ideology. She thought about leaving China and the success of her first two films helped to win a Rockefeller scholarship. She enrolled in the MFA program in New York University and graduated in 1996. Although she did not complete a single film in New York, her experience in New York inspired many fictional works, including novellas “The Abingdon Square”, “Burning Connections”, “A Drop of Ram Shit” set in New York, “Exile’s Return” and “On the Way Home”—all collected in her novella collection titled On the Way Home.

In the following decade, she made a series of films about Shanghai. Shanghai Women (2002) portrays contemporary life in the fast-changing city. Shanghai Story (2004), which explores the vicissitudes of life of a bourgeois family from the 1920s to the 1990s, won four Golden Rooster Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture.

In 2009, Peng co-directed (with Louisa Wei) the documentary Storm Under the Sun, an investigation of the Hu Feng affair which had implicated her father. Peng and Wei interviewed 26 people who had been denounced as "counterrevolutionaries" for their association with Hu Feng.

Selected filmography As director