Mama is a 1990 Chinese film directed by Zhang Yuan. Zhang Yuan's directorial debut, Mama is today considered a seminal film in the history of Chinese independent cinema, and by extension, as a pioneering film of the Sixth Generation of which Zhang is a member. Shot on an extreme budget within Zhang Yuan's apartment, Mama, follows the story of a mother and her grown mentally challenged son.
The film focuses on a librarian struggling to raise her mentally handicapped son in modern day Beijing while at the same time dealing with an absent and unresponsive husband. The story garnered much criticism from state-censors, who found the film too dark.
While the film was originally written to end on the dour note of the mother euthanizing her son, director Zhang Yuan eventually opted for a more open-ended and ambiguous conclusion.
The film that was to become Mama began as a screenplay in the Children's Film Studio for a film entitled The Sun Tree as based on a story by writer Dai Qing. Zhang Yuan at the time was still a student in the Beijing Film Academy's cinematography department and was slated to serve as the film's director of photography, with Fifth Generation graduate Sun Chen slated
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