Born in Rizhao, Shandong, on 13 May 1941, Mou Tun-fei moved to Taiwan with his family in 1949 at the age of eight. He studied directing in the film-and-drama department of Taiwan's National School of Arts, where the school lacked even basic equipment, so he taught himself by watching films repeatedly and counting their cuts; he also took part in the literary journal Wenxue Jikan. In 1969 he made his first black-and-white feature, I Don't Dare to Tell You, refused a release licence for its teacher-student romance, and his second film, The End of the Track (1970), about the bond between two schoolboys, was also banned; both were among Taiwan's earliest independent productions and showed his readiness to handle taboo subjects. From 1973 he roamed Europe and Central and South America, at one point earning a living teaching Chinese, and after 1977 he settled in Hong Kong and joined Shaw Brothers, where he made films such as Dreams of Eroticism and gained a reputation as one of the studio's most extreme directors. In 1983 he directed The Young Heroes of Shaolin, the first film shot in Sichuan's Jiuzhaigou valley. From 1982 he spent four years travelling to Japan and the United States to gather material on Japan's wartime biological warfare, and in 1988 he wrote and directed Men Behind the Sun for Sil-Metropole, released in Hong Kong on 23 December that year at 105 minutes and taking about HK$1.09 million. A graphic account of Unit 731's germ-warfare and human experiments, the film shocked audiences, used real cadavers in some shots and stirred moral controversy, became the first Hong Kong film rated Category III, and was cut by nine minutes for the mainland. In 1995 he made Men Behind the Sun: Nanking Massacre and co-directed Blood Love with Lee Wah-yuet, continuing to probe the darker sides of war and human nature. In the late 1990s he moved to the United States and gradually retired from filmmaking. He died at his home in Philadelphia on 25 May 2019, aged 78.
Mou Tun-fei is best known for Men Behind the Sun, whose near-documentary staging of Japanese germ-warfare atrocities proved hugely controversial and coincided with the birth of Hong Kong's Category III rating. His earlier taboo-breaking films such as The End of the Track made him an outlier in both Taiwanese and Hong Kong cinema, and his extreme style left its mark on later war and horror pictures.
Achievements
- 1970 · Directed The End of the Track, banned for its subject matter
- 1988 · Wrote and directed Men Behind the Sun, the first Hong Kong Category III film
- 1995 · Directed Men Behind the Sun: Nanking Massacre