Mama is an absolutely heroic achievement for Zhang Yuan: the first independent feature made in China since the Communists took power. But the film hasn't been released in China....Zhang's sense of Beijing's street-level realities couldn't be keener, but what makes the movie truly subversive is its sense of poetry. Beijing librarian Liang Dan, all but deserted by her husband, struggles to bring up her retarded son Dongdong. She gets no help from the state and can neither bring him to work with her nor leave him locked up at home. When her attempts to reactivate the boy's learning ability fail, she contemplates abandoning him in the city or giving him a painless overdose of sleeping pills. This low-key and firmly unsentimental fiction is intercut with documentary material: glimpses of one of China's very few centers for retarded kids, and interviews with their mothers and women relatives-who include the film's leading actress and screenwriter, Qin Yan. -Tony Rayns (SFIFF '92)