Sun Yu

Sun Yu (March 21, 1900 – July 11, 1990) was a major leftist film director active in the 1930s in Shanghai. One of the core directors of the Lianhua Film Company, Sun Yu made a name for himself with a series of socially conscious dramas in the early to mid-1930s. After the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, Sun Yu made his way to the interior, where he continued to make films glorifying the war effort against the Japanese.

His career took a turn for the worse after the Communist victory in 1949. In The Life of Wu Xun, Sun Yu's big-budget biographical picture of the titular Qing Dynasty educator, Sun attracted the wrath of Mao Zedong, who personally criticized the film in an essay. Though Sun never fully recovered from the episode, he has regained his reputation as one of the foremost filmmakers of the golden age of Chinese cinema.

Besides his work in cinematography, Sun Yu is known as a poet and translator, with two translations of Li Po's poems appearing in Poetry magazine in 1926, and a full-length book of selected Li Po poems with translations and commentary appearing in 1982.

Sun Yu's films Playthings (Little Toys) (1933), Daybreak (1933), Sports Queen (1934), and The Great Road (The Big Road) (1934) are available with English subtitles on YouTube.

Biography Sun Yu was born in the city of Chongqing and educated first at Tsinghua University in Beijing before continuing his education in drama at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

After taking his degree in 1925, Sun enrolled at the New York Institute of Photography, where his courses included cinematography and film editing. He also took evening courses at Columbia University in screenwriting and other, related courses. During this time he also audited a series of lectures on writing for the theater given by David Belasco which influenced him greatly.

Upon returning to China in the summer of 1926, Sun Yu directed his first film, A Romantic Swordsman, with the faltering Minxin Film Company. Beginning in the 1930s, Sun Yu began a collaboration with the leftist film studio, Lianhua, where he became one of the core group of "socially conscious" directors along with Cai Chusheng, Fei Mu, and others. As a result, Sun Yu's reputation was soon in ruins, and his career effectively stalled. Sun Yu would go on to direct only a handful of titles over the next twenty years. In 1985, thirty-five years after the release of The Life of Wu Xun, members of the Chinese politburo finally admitted that Mao's campaign, and the criticisms that it instigated against the film, was essentially baseless.

Sun Yu died in Shanghai in 1990.

Selected filmography