Cai Chusheng
蔡楚生
Chinese director, 1906–1968. He worked at the Lianhua company in the 1930s, and his Song of the Fishermen took a prize at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1935, the first international festival award to a Chinese film. In 1947 he co-directed The Spring River Flows East with Zheng Junli.
Career
Cai was born in Shanghai to a Cantonese family, was apprenticed to a shop in Shantou as a boy, and entered the film business back in Shanghai in 1927 as a continuity assistant. He began directing for Lianhua in 1931. Song of the Fishermen ran for eighty-four days in 1934, a record for a Chinese film at the time, and took an honorary award at the Moscow festival the following year, the first international prize won by a Chinese picture.
He spent the war between Hong Kong and the interior, and in 1947 co-directed The Spring River Flows East with Zheng Junli; released in two parts, it played for more than three months. After 1949 he was a deputy head of the film bureau and chaired the association of Chinese film workers. He was denounced at the start of the Cultural Revolution and died in 1968.
