Zhu Xiao-Mei: How Bach Defeated Mao

Zhu Xiao-Mei was a piano prodigy as a young musician in China. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the early 1960’s –these were the 60’s for Mao’s China - she had the kind of talent that could earn you public humiliation and a prison sentence. Zhu and other musicians were persecuted, yet the young pianist found her way out of China, and to France, where she studied and established herself as an interpreter of Johann Sebastian Bach. 

Paul Smaczny’s film witnesses her return to China, and to sold-out concerts of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It’s a poignant moment when she reunites after half a century with other classical musicians who survived Mao’s purges.

Filmography: Die Thomaner - Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben (2012), John Cage: Journeys in Sound (2012), El sistema (2008).