Peng Ning

"The Wind of Early Summer" is a colorful wide-screen feature film that reflects the side-by-side progress of two young men and women on the road of life after the "Gang of Four" was crushed in 1976. Yang Xiaozhen, who made a name for himself as a piano player at a young age, was in great pain because his right hand was injured and he could no longer play the piano because he worked in a scrap company. Later, with the encouragement of the young man Fu Ming, the fire of hope was rekindled in her frustrated heart...

With the birth of New China, a husband-and-wife pair of Overseas Chinese painters resolve to return to the embrace of their motherland, and their child is born under the five-starred red flag. But these Overseas Chinese patriots are persecuted in various political campaigns and their daughter subject to discrimination from childhood. The male lead freezes to death as a fugitive and draws a giant question mark in the snow before dying. The daughter emigrates following the Cultural Revolution; when her relatives try to stop her, she says: "You love the motherland, but does the motherland love you?" Based on a script by Bai Hua, SUN AND MAN was completed in 1981 but permanently shelved following high-level criticism and a public campaign against its "anti-Party" character. The film is said to survive in the studio archive but has never been publicly screened. A Taiwanese adaptation of the script (with some modifications) was released in 1982 under the English title PORTRAIT OF A FANATIC.