Children of Crescent River

Where the Huai River winds its way through the land, wisps of cooking smoke along Crescent River seem to curl gently around half a century of upheaval and change.

Li Youfu, a steadfast guardian of land policy, is like an old tree with deep roots in his native soil, holding firm to the land to the very end. Ma Chunlan wraps her fervent love in a plain homespun shirt, pouring her personal ambitions without reservation into the surging tide of the times...

Ma Shibao is defeated by the raging tide of the Great Leap Forward. Ma Qiusheng gives his life in the years of the people’s communes. Ma Chunsheng and Wang Xiaoya lose their way during the extraordinary period when educated youth are sent to the countryside. Li Yumei dies while pursuing her career. “Ghost-Proof” shakes his pellet drum, as if rattling out a lifetime of regrets he can never let go. After weathering the ups and downs of political life, Li Yuanchao goes on to shine in the business world in a very different way.

From the blood-red dawn of the campaigns to suppress bandits and counterrevolutionaries to the blazing dusk of the campaign to make steel; from the confusion beneath kerosene lamps in the educated youth settlements to the bustle and clamor around individual vendors’ stalls, this four-part historical epic uses Crescent River as a unique lens, clearly reflecting the profound transformations of rural China under the impact of the tides of history. As new rings form in the white-fruited trees, some people leave deep footprints in the field ridges, while others drift far away with the currents of the age. Only the waters of Crescent River remain unchanged, reflecting the figures who struggle through fervor and anguish, and the souls mercilessly scorched by ideals and relentlessly tempered by reality. Like the fireflies along its banks that never go out, they illuminate the rings of time deep within the years.