Father is parody of the conflict between a son who challenges his father’s authoritarianism and the father who is threatened by this. The father, Ma Linsheng, is the leader of the labor union and a member of the party. When his wife dies, he takes care of his teenage son alone. He loves his son dearly, yet he is a strict patriarch who doesn’t hesitate to use the stick on his child. One day, when his son, Ma Che, gets into trouble at school, Ma Linsheng writes his son’s self-criticism memo and forces him to submit it to his teacher. But when Ma Che refuses to do so, serious tension arises between father and son. Confronted with his son’s resistance, he becomes more and more delusional about the traditional meaning of family that used to be prevalent in China and in turn this becomes a representation of the fall of the patriarch and the upper class as well. This debut feature film of Wang Shuo was finished in 1996, but was kept from public release due to the ban placed on the film by Chinese government. (Ancha Flubacher Rhim)