King of the Children

1988 [CHINESE]

Action / Drama

5
IMDb Rating 7.1/10 10 727 727

Plot summary

An unschooled young man, one of the countless victims of Mao's Cultural Revolution, is laboring in the countryside when he is assigned to teach in a nearby school. Gradually, he abandons the Maoist textbook and encourages the barely literate kids to write about their own lives and feelings.

Director

Kaige Chen Photo
Kaige Chen

Top cast

Xiaolu Qiang Photo
Xiaolu Qiang
Li Tan Photo
Li Tan
Jianjun Su Photo
Jianjun Su
Tuo Tan Photo
Tuo Tan as Village team-leader
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
915.69 MB
1280*682
Chinese 2.0
NR
Subtitles cn  
24 fps
1 hr 46 min
Seeds ...
1.63 GB
1920*1024
Chinese 2.0
NR
Subtitles cn  
24 fps
1 hr 46 min
Seeds 3

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by lilianaoana 7 / 10

Trippy, beautiful. Worth a watch

This was kind of a trippy experience for me and not at all what I would've expected after let's say Yellow Earth. It's very elusive with it's ideas, possibly due to the censorship, It's suggestive enough so that I have a few suspicions about some of what is happening, it has some dream-like scenes, which the director did not employ in any of his other movies that I have seen, it's got some beautiful visuals that are quite artistic in these very minimalistic sets and bare landscapes. That dried out tree is the subject of several surreal compositions. It's a climate I cannot make sense of, the area looks both lush and barren, droughty. The school is in the open air, apart from the thatched roof practically.I don't really understand the ending, it was again a little trippy, I don't know whether the mountain on fire was just a reflection of that poem of a manifestation of the last line of dialogue and why. Maybe censorship caused the writers to get creative and lend the story to several interpretations. I resented that a little. The dialogues are also very inconclusive, especially when it matters. I had bad subtitles clearly, but all the same. The higher ups disliked his teaching methods. It's not clearly stated whether he was in a labour/reeducation camp, but it looked like it. He had been in the area for seven years but I don't think he taught the children more than a few months. It's said he was unschooled but he was clearly well read. It's a little annoying not knowing for sure. In Chinese it seems it's important to achieve knowledge of as many words as possible. The higher the number, the better. In that regard he was obviously qualified to teach. And then there's this guy's hair, which was trippy in itself. Was this a reflection of eighties' sensibilities or some people's hair just sits like that? See, I can't shake these thoughts...
Reviewed by zzmale 10 / 10

An eulogy of humanity hidden in the social criticism

In contrast to his previous works of carefully concealing the criticism of not-so-favorite part of Chinese tradition, this film took a completely different turn: although generally shaped by the social criticism, namely, targeting Cultural Revolution, there is a praise of the good part of traditional Chinese culture, such as the dedication for the next generation, the endurance, the emphasis on education.
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