In May 2003, Peng Xiaolian called me and asked if I was interested in working on a documentary project about the Hu Feng Case. All I knew about Hu Feng then was that he was a literary critic who founded the Leftist literary magazines of July and Hope in the 1930s and 1940s. I heard about the national campaign against Hu Feng in 1955 but did not know what the campaign was like or why it took place. According to Xiaolian, what I knew was already "a lot comparing to others in the younger generations." Growing up after the Cultural Revolution, I have no memory of any political movement. My parents who were born in the 1930s, however, had experienced endless wars and political disasters from the late 1930s to the late 1970s. I did not understand why they had tried every way to keep me away from entering art and humanity majors in university. In 1992, I became an MA student in the Comparative Literature program at Carleton University in Canada and eventually received my doctoral degree in Comparative Literature - Film Studies at the University of Alberta. After I began teaching in City University of Hong Kong in 2001, my parents felt a relief: "We thought you were going through a path that was too narrow, but we are glad that now you have found your ideal job." Two years later, I began making Storm under the Sun with Xiaolian. My parents felt the habitual tension for my working on "such a politically sensitive project," but they soon concluded that I should be alright as a Canadian passport holder.

Xiaolian is well-versed in both literature and film, having written most of her film scripts and many fiction works. After reading a few books on the case, I immediately saw two evident reasons that urged us to make the documentary immediately. On one hand, most people who were directly involved and victimized in the case had passed away and those who were alive were in their eighties. If we did not interview them soon, we would soon loose the chance to do so. On the other hand, the Hu Feng Case is really a unique event in modern Chinese history, where one man was so fiercely condemned by Mao that over 2100 people were condemned along his side. For me, the making of the film was a process of realization that the 1955 national campaign against Hu Feng was a rehearsal for all larger-scaled politically movements to come—including the 1957 Anti-rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). We hoped to do something that was not yet done in documentary about the PRC's history: to trace back the origin of all political movements from an intellectual's point of view.