Story of Mother

Director: Sung Tsun-Shou

1973 / 98min / DCP

Adapted from the enormously influential author Yu Lihua’s novel Mother and Son, Sung’s film is an enormously compassionate drama about a young mother (Li Hsiang) seen stepping out on her husband by their child, an incident that, in the wake of his long-ailing father’s death and his mother’s subsequent remarriage, feeds a fire of hatred in the boy’s heart. Depicting, with an admirable withholding of judgment and emotional acuity, new tensions arising in a rapidly modernizing society still bound by very traditional notions of feminine self-sacrifice and filial piety, Story of Mother won plaudits for its fingers-on-the-pulse contemporaneity, voted the year’s best Mandarin-language film by an association of Taiwanese critics.

Theatrical licenses courtesy of Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute

Part of Jiā: Histories of Home