Storm Under the Sun

Streaming video - 2009

This film documents the persecution of Hu Feng, a renowned writer and literary critic who championed artistic freedom and was jailed and purged in the 1950s. Hu was the first intellectual to be singled out and directly condemned by Mao Zedong. Initiated upon his arrest in 1955, the party-state’s Anti–Hu Feng Counter-Revolutionary Group Campaign led to the imprisonment of seventy-eight other Chinese intellectuals and the incrimination of more than 2,100 people. Throughout his long imprisonment and ever since his rehabilitation in 1981, Hu has remained a symbol of intellectual freedom to younger writers. This documentary, the first to examine these events after more than a half-century, invites survivors of the “storm” to reveal the t...ruths that lie beneath China’s official history. "*Peng Xiaolian spent many years completing this memorial to her father’s generation. Her father, like many Chinese intellectuals, was caught up in a series of political campaigns and was sacrificed to the “revolutionary struggle” endemic to the Mao years in China.*" – ***Ai Weiwei*** more