General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Road Home (我的父亲母亲)

The Road Home (我的父亲母亲) is a 1999 Chinese romance film directed by Zhang Yimou, adapted by the author Bao Shi (鲍十) from his own novel Remembrance (《纪念》), about a village schoolteacher's courtship of a young countrywoman, told in flashback after the teacher's death. It was released in China on 16 October 1999, runs 89 minutes, and won the Silver Bear Jury Grand Prix at the 50th Berlin International Film Festival.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Zhang Yimou; screenplay by Bao Shi, adapted from his novel Remembrance (《纪念》)¹
Release	16 October 1999 (China); 89 minutes; Mandarin²
Principal cast	Zhang Ziyi (young Zhao Di), Zheng Hao (Luo Changyu), Sun Honglei (Luo Yusheng), Zhao Yuelin (old Zhao Di), Li Bin (grandmother)³
Key crew	Cinematography Hou Yong; music San Bao; production Guangxi Film Studios with Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia³^•⁴
Signature device	Black-and-white for the present, color for memories; the opening black-and-white sequence runs 13 minutes 54 seconds⁵
Major awards	Berlin Silver Bear (Jury Grand Prix) and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, 2000; Golden Rooster Best Picture and Best Director; Hundred Flowers Best Picture and Best Actress (Zhang Ziyi)²
Box office	US$6.78 million worldwide as of 23 June 2024; US$1.3 million in the United States¹^•⁴

Spoilers

Story

The frame story is set in a snow-covered village in northern China. Luo Yusheng (Sun Honglei), a businessman working in the city, returns home after many years when his father, the village schoolteacher Luo Changyu, dies in a neighboring town. His elderly mother insists that, according to local custom, the coffin be carried back to the village on foot so that her husband's spirit can find its way home.³ While the funeral arrangements proceed, the son narrates the story of his parents' courtship decades earlier.⁶

In the flashback, the young Zhao Di (Zhang Ziyi), a country girl known for her beauty and handcrafts, falls for Luo Changyu (Zheng Hao), the newly arrived young teacher, and pursues him with a persistence the film reduces to a few repeated actions: waiting, searching, watching, and running. She is described in Chinese coverage as the first girl in her locality to choose free love rather than an arranged match.¹^•⁷ The courtship is interrupted when the teacher is taken away for questioning in connection with the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, and the two are separated for two years before they can marry.⁸ At the end of the film, the son honors his father's dearest wish by teaching one day in the village school before returning to the city.⁴

Color structure and visual style

The film's most discussed formal choice is its reversal of the usual color convention: the present-day funeral story is shot in black and white, while the remembered past is in saturated color. Zhang explained the logic as psychological: the present is a funeral, heavy and snowy, and monochrome carries that mood, while the remembered mother must be the most beautiful and radiant version of her, a beauty with strong subjective color.⁷ The opening black-and-white sequence, establishing the father's death, runs 13 minutes 54 seconds, and the film stays in color until 1 hour 9 minutes 57 seconds, after which black-and-white and color alternate; dissolves between the two modes carry the emotional transitions.⁵ Of the film's 89 minutes, 55 are in color.⁷

Red is the dominant accent. Zhao Di's pink padded jacket and red scarf recur against autumn and winter landscapes, and critics read the reds as signs of vitality, passion, and hope set against the cold environment.⁹^•¹⁰ Small objects carry the romance: a hairpin the teacher gives Zhao Di, which she loses and searches for over days, and a blue-and-white porcelain bowl he once used, kept as a keepsake. Dissolves are used throughout, from the transition between the funeral frame and the past to repeated shots of the dinner table as Zhao Di brings meals day after day during the school's construction.¹⁰

Production

Zhang shot the film in 1998, back to back with Not One Less, deliberately choosing two small, uncommercial subjects in styles he had not tried before. The project had a personal origin: while staging the opera Turandot in Italy, his own father died, and he connected that feeling of guilt toward aging parents to the story. The crew arrived on the Bashang grassland of Hebei on 7 September 1998, and shooting began on 12 September, lasting 55 days.⁷

He cast new and non-professional actors because the film presents a subjective memory rather than objective realism, and he wanted faces that looked unspoiled. The actress playing the old Zhao Di was found after two teams searched nearby villages for two months; she was illiterate, had recently lost her own husband, and believed during filming that the story was true, which Zhang credited for the authenticity of the black-and-white sections.⁷ He described the approach as subtraction rather than addition, keeping the details that had moved him in the novel and avoiding plot-driven conflict; he also linked the film to the tradition of Fei Mu's poetic Spring in a Small Town (1947).⁷

In April 1999, Zhang publicly released a letter to Cannes festival president Gilles Jacob withdrawing both Not One Less and The Road Home from that year's competition.¹¹ Not One Less went on to win the Golden Lion at Venice, and at a September 1999 Beijing event a deputy director of the film bureau called The Road Home a classic art film of recent years.⁷

Reception and awards

At the 50th Berlin International Film Festival in 2000 the film won the Silver Bear Jury Grand Prix and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, with a Golden Bear nomination for Zhang.² In China it took the Golden Rooster Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography (Hou Yong), and Best Art Direction (Cao Jiuping), and the Hundred Flowers Award for Best Picture with Zhang Ziyi as Best Actress, among 14 wins and 2 nominations recorded overall.² It also won the World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance in 2001.¹²

Western critics responded warmly to its simplicity. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 89% critics score from 80 reviews and a 90% audience score; the site's critics consensus calls it a simple, touching, tender love story beautifully filmed.⁴ Metacritic gives it a metascore of 71 from 25 reviews, with high marks from the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post and reservations from critics who found the story slight.¹³ The soundtrack by San Bao, with its prominent flute writing, drew repeated comparison to James Horner's score for Titanic.¹⁴^•¹⁵

Some critics read the film politically. Time Out noted that setting the rapturous color flashbacks in the politically fraught 1950s implies the past was truer and more sincere than the gray present, and observed that the romance breaks the local tradition of arranged marriages.⁸^•¹⁶ Zhang has said the film was his tribute to and was heavily influenced by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.¹⁷

The same-name television series

A 38-episode Chinese television series also titled My Father and Mother (我的父亲母亲), directed by Liu Huining and starring Chen Xiaoyi, Xin Baiqing, and Feng Yuanzheng, premiered on 20 July 2013. It tells a different story, about an urban-educated rural teacher and a country girl, and is a separate work from the film.¹⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films late 1990s › Released in 1999

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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