Foreign Movie Review: COMING HOME (2015) A+

A sad movie about what could happen to people when political dictators separate loving couples for many years.  Lu Yanshi  and Feng Wanyu  are a devoted couple forced to separate when Lu is arrested and sent to a labor camp as a political prisoner, just as his wife is injured in an accident. Released during the last days of the Cultural Revolution, he finally returns home only to find that his wife has amnesia and remembers little of her past. Unable to recognize Lu, she patiently waits for her husband's return.

This movie shows how far the Chinese have come in admitting the terrible repression that occurred during the Cultural Revolution.  It is an absolute reputation of the politicians that ruled China during that period of the late 1960's and 1970's.  As an aside , we in the USA have never really and publicly come to grips to the excesses of the Vietnam and Iraq invasions.

China’s Communist leader Mao Zedong launched what became known as the Cultural Revolution in order to reassert his authority over the Chinese government. Believing that current Communist leaders were taking the party, and China itself, in the wrong direction, Mao called on the nation’s youth to purge the “impure” elements of Chinese society and revive the revolutionary spirit that had led to victory in the civil war 20 decades earlier and the formation of the People’s Republic of China. The Cultural Revolution continued in various phases until Mao’s death in 1976, and its tormented and violent legacy would resonate in Chinese politics and society for decades to come.