The Blue Kite (1993)
cast: Yi Tian, Zhang Wenyao, Chen Xiaoman, Lu Liping, Pu Quanxin, Li Xuejian, Guo Baochang, Zhong Ping, Chu Quanzhong, Song Xiaoying, Zhang Hong, Liu Yanjin, Li Bin, Lu Zhang, and Guo Donglin
director: Tian Zhuangzhuang

Mao Zedong, the father of Chinese communism, once proclaimed that "religion is poison." While you may feel the need to empathize; every time I view a film such as Tian Zhuangzhuang's "The Blue Kite" I smirk when I think of Mao's quote.

The narrator of "The Blue Kite" is also the film's protagonist, a young boy whose name is Tietou, which means "iron head." As the film opens in the early '50s, following the communist liberation of 1949, Tietou's voiceover notes that his parents' marriage and his subsequent birth is delayed by the announcement of Jospeh Stalin's death in neighboring Russia.

The nuclear family that becomes the focal point of "The Blue Kite" during Mao's Great Leap Forward in the '50s and '60s and the Cultural Revolution in the '60s and '70s, are of a simple nature and an impressionable mind. They inhabit rural Beijing far from the luxuries of the Party, but never above its thumb or outside of its opticals.

When the news of Stalin's passing comes blarring over a loud speaker the villagers wonder aloud who Stalin was.