Mou was born on 3 May 1941, in
Shandong, China. His family left China for Taiwan in 1949 due to the
Chinese Civil War. Mou attended the National School of Arts (now
National Taiwan University of Arts) that could not even afford equipment for the students. Mou thus was forced to learn filmmaking by theory alone, mainly by watching films numerous times in theaters and identifying how many cuts the films contained. After graduation, Mou was assistant director on an
anti-communist propaganda film called
Give Back My Country and then directed numerous Taiwanese films in a style akin to the
Italian neorealist movement. His first and second feature, ''I Didn't Dare to Tell You
(1969) and At the Runway's Edge'' (1970) were both banned by the Taiwanese government, especially the latter film for containing homosexual overtones. In 1977, Mou settled in Hong Kong and joined
Shaw Brothers Studio. His first film,
Gun, was part of an exploitation true crime anthology
The Criminals. While at Shaw Brothers, Mou would dabble in crime films (
Bank Busters), romance (
Melody of Love), horror (
Haunted Tales) and
kung-fu (
A Deadly Secret). However, his most notable work for Shaw Brothers would be
Lost Souls (1980), a film telling the story of a group of
illegal immigrants taken captive and sexually and physically abused by a gang of human traffickers.
Lost Souls has often been called a brazen, vicious and outrageous
exploitation film reminiscent of
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Mou then left Shaw Brothers to become the first director from Taiwan to work in the mainland. While working on a children’s kung fu film called
Young Heroes, Mou began to hear stories about war atrocities committed by the
Imperial Japanese Army during the
Second Sino-Japanese War. Hearing about the biological experimentation on Chinese
prisoners of war (POWs) and civilians spurred Mou to direct
Men Behind the Sun (1988), a Hong Kong–mainland co-production about the war crimes committed by the military stationed at
Unit 731 in Manchuria. After co-directing the
hardcore pornographic film
Trilogy of Lust with Julie Lee Wah-yuet, Mou directed a follow-up to
Men Behind the Sun called
Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (1995), about the
Nanjing Massacre. Mou died on 25 May 2019 at his home in Philadelphia. == Legacy ==