Dead Souls - Part III
China • 2h 55m
Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2018 • 175 minutes
In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as “ultra-rightists” in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the Jiabiangou and Mingshui reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.
“A film of resistance that, in discussing the past, also confronts the present-day activities of the Chinese government; [foretelling future memorials] for the victims of today’s camps and bearing witness to the cruel injustices of the country’s reigning overlords.” —The New Yorker
“Weighty and mindfully austere, Dead Souls shines a bright and steady spotlight into a dark corner of 20th century Chinese history.” —Film Comment
Up Next in China
-
Disorder
Directed by Huang Weikai • Documentary • 2009 • 58 minutes
Huang Weikai's one-of-a-kind news documentary captures, with remarkable freedom, the anarchy, violence, and seething anxiety animating China's major cities today. As urbanization in China advances at a breakneck pace, Chinese cities teet...
-
The East Wind State Farm
Directed by HU Jie • Documentary • 2009 • 101 minutes
Condemned "Rightists," sentenced to 21 years of thought reform in the countryside, share harrowing first-person accounts of life in a Chinese labor camp.
In 1957, 200 teachers, students, and cadres were labeled as "Rightists" for voicing cri...
-
Egg and Stone
Directed by Huang Ji • Drama • With Xiao Pin-gao, Liu Xiao-lin, Yao Hong-gui, Yixiang Huang, Baiyu Yao • 2016 • 98 minutes
Huang Ji's brave personal film is one of the most auspicious debuts in recent Chinese cinema. Set in her home village in rural Hunan province, EGG AND STONE is a powerful au...
