Sun Yu
Born	(1900-03-21)March 21, 1900 Chongqing, China
Died	July 11, 1990(1990-07-11) (aged 90) Shanghai
Occupation	Film director
Chinese name
Traditional Chinese	孫瑜
Simplified Chinese	孙瑜
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Sūn Yú

Sun Yu (March 21, 1900 – July 11, 1990) was a major leftistfilm director active in the 1930s inShanghai. One of the core directors of theLianhua Film Company, Sun Yu made a name for himself with a series of socially conscious dramas in the early to mid-1930s. After theJapanese invasion of China in 1937, Sun Yu made his way to the interior, where he continued to make films glorifying the war effort against the Japanese.

His career took a turn for the worse after the Communist victory in 1949. InThe Life of Wu Xun, Sun Yu's big-budget biographical picture of the titular Qing Dynastyeducator, Sun attracted the wrath ofMao Zedong, who personally criticized the film in an essay. Though Sun never fully recovered from the episode, he has regained his reputation as one of the foremost filmmakers of the golden age ofChinese cinema.

Besides his work in cinematography, Sun Yu is known as a poet and translator, with two translations ofLi Po's poems appearing inPoetry magazine in 1926, and a full-length book of selected Li Po poems with translations and commentary appearing in 1982.

Sun Yu's filmsPlaythings (Little Toys) (1933),Daybreak (1933),Sports Queen (1934), andThe Great Road (The Big Road) (1934) are available with English subtitles on YouTube.^[1][2]

Sun Yu was born in the city ofChongqing and educated first atTsinghua University inBeijing before continuing his education indrama at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison.^[3]

After taking his degree in 1925, Sun enrolled at theNew York Institute of Photography, where his courses included cinematography and film editing. He also took evening courses atColumbia University in screenwriting and other, related courses.^[4] During this time he also audited a series of lectures on writing for the theater given byDavid Belasco which influenced him greatly.^[5]

Upon returning to China in the summer of 1926, Sun Yu directed his first film,A Romantic Swordsman, with the falteringMinxin Film Company.^[6] Beginning in the 1930s, Sun Yu began a collaboration with the leftist film studio,Lianhua, where he became one of the core group of "socially conscious" directors along withCai Chusheng,Fei Mu, and others.^[6] While with Lianhua, Sun directed some of his most lasting works, includingWild Rose (1932),Loving Blood of the Volcano (1932),Daybreak (1933),Little Toys (1933), andThe Big Road (1934).^[6]

With the outbreak of the full-fledged war with Japan in 1937, Sun, like many of his colleagues, fled to the interior to the Nationalist wartime capital ofChongqing where he directed several propaganda films praising the war effort.^[6]

Upon the end of the war, Sun Yu began preparing for his most important production yet, a biographical epic of the Qing Dynasty educator,Wu Xun, who spread literacy among the common people. Sun's last major work,The Life of Wu Xun was made with theKunlun Film Company and starred one of the top actors of the day,Zhao Dan, in thetitular role. Shortly after its release, however,The Life of Wu Xun was personally denounced byMao Zedong. In thePeople's Daily Mao attacked Wu Xun as a liberal whose literacy programs implied that revolution was not necessary. The flurry of criticism that Mao's denunciation triggered was the "first major politico-ideological campaign" of the post-1949 revolution, and its effects were immediate.^[7] As a result, Sun Yu's reputation was soon in ruins, and his career effectively stalled.^[6] Sun Yu would go on to direct only a handful of titles over the next twenty years. In 1985, thirty-five years after the release ofThe Life of Wu Xun, members of the Chinese politburo finally admitted that Mao's campaign, and the criticisms that it instigated against the film, was essentially baseless.^[7]

Sun Yu died in Shanghai in 1990.

• Rea, Christopher.Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.ISBN 9780231188135
• Sun, Yu [孫瑜], translation, introduction, and commentary (1982).Li Po-A New Translation 李白詩新譯. Hong Kong: The Commercial Press,ISBN 962 07 1025 8

• Chinese Film Classics: Sun Yu (chinesefilmclassics.org) - scholarly website based at the University of British Columbia with English-subtitled copies of and video lectures on several Sun Yu films, includingSports Queen andThe Great Road, as well as biographical information
• Sun Yu atIMDb
• Sun Yu at the Chinese Movie Data base
• Sun Yu and National Cinema
• Biography

• 1900 births
• 1990 deaths
• Film directors from Chongqing
• Columbia University alumni
• Tsinghua University alumni
• University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
• Chinese film directors
• Chinese silent film directors

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