MULBERRY CHILD REENACTS THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION FROM A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE
What suffering occurred during the Cultural Revolution? Whereas the autobiographical Mulberry Child (2008) by Jian Ping describes the suffering of one family, the film Mulberry Child presents a docudrama of that experience while focusing on the interplay between Jian Ping (played by the author herself) and her Americanized daughter Lisa Xia, who has lived in Chicago from the age of 3 but frustrates her mother. Lisa appreciates neither Chinese values nor the hardships that her mother experienced during the Cultural Revolution, so the book is written to provide both. What filmviewers will appreciate in the film is not just the hard life of a family forced to live in a mud hut because their father was detained as a dissident but why education, family, perseverance, respect, and stolidity are so important to Chinese. Mulberry Child, directed, produced, and written by Susan Morgan Cooper, hints that the generation gap between the first and second generations can be filled for the benefit of both if metacommunication lines can be opened. As a reenactment of the Cultural Revolution and the pride that Chinese enjoyed from viewing the 2008 Olympics that bookends the film, the Political Film Society has nominated Mulberry Child as best film exposé and best film on human rights of 2012. MH