Red Cherry (1995)

Red Cherry (红樱桃, fanti: 紅櫻桃, pinyin: Hóng yīng táo) is a 1995 film directed by Ye Ying (also known as Daying Ye). The Director of Photography was Zhang Li, a fifth generation filmmaker and classmate of Chen Kaige. Red Cherry won Best Picture at the 1996 Golden Rooster Awards.

The film was made in China in 1995 under the title Hong ying tao starring Ke-Yu Guo, Vladmill Nizmiroff, Xu Xiaoling. The movie was based on the true story of Chuchu, a 13-year-old Chinese girl, and Luo Xiaoman, a 12-year-old Chinese boy, who were sent to Moscow, Russia in the 1940s and enrolled into an international boarding school. There they had so many great and difficult experiences as they tried to survive during World War II.

The children's real encounter with fate began as kanikuli (summer break) arrived, Chuchu accompanied her class to a children’s camp in Belarus, while Xiaoman remained in Moscow. Then, Russia was invaded by Germany's Operation Barbarossa. Red Cherry is basically an account of the two orphans’ parallel experiences of the war.

The film was China's biggest box office hit in 1995. Internationally, the film was selected in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival in 1996. The film also won Audience Choice award (Best Foreign Language Film) in Palm Springs International Film Festival in 1996. The film was selected as the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 68th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.

Synopsis

The film begins in the early summer of 1941, at the Ivanov International School in Moscow. Luo Xiaoman and Chuchu were two new students who had come to Russia after the brutal White Terror in China killed their parents (as Chuchu described in front of her class how her father, a communist revolutionary, being executed in front of her by the Kuomintang). Chuchu and Luo quickly learned to fit in with the other international students and they also learned to speak Russian fluently.

Actors