D
Dai Sijie
🇨🇳China
Sijie Dai is a French-Chinese filmmaker and novelist best known for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000), a semi-autobiographical novel about two educated young men sent to a remote mountain village for re-education during the Cultural Revolution who discover a hidden suitcase of translated Western literature — and fall in love with the seamstress whose world the books transform.
The novel, written in French by a director who studied film in Beijing before emigrating to France, became an international bestseller and an acclaimed film (directed by Dai himself). It is a love letter to literature and to the transformative power of reading, set against one of the twentieth century's most tragic campaigns of cultural destruction.
