Directed by Hu Jie • Documentary • 2019 • 114 minutes

SPARK opens by the side of a road in Lanzhou City, northwestern China, as trucks rumble through a blasted hillside. An elderly man walks along the dusty road and pauses to point to a nearby spot—the former execution grounds. “They executed many,” the man says. “Then fewer and fewer.” Two of those executed were contributors to Spark, a short-lived magazine from Gansu Province whose young, intellectual contributors bravely shone a light on the horrific realities of life during the Great Leap Forward. More than 35 million people died of famine between 1959 and 1961, in large part because of Communist Party policies. To this day, the Party has never fully acknowledged the scope of the disaster. In SPARK, filmmaker Hu Jie—who has been described as “China’s most important unofficial historian-filmmaker”— tracks down the surviving men and women of Spark, including founder Gu Yan, allowing them to tell their stories. Weaving together their interviews, the film is in an oral history of the magazine and the tumultuous period that from which it arose. The interviews are striking in their clarity and their emotional immediacy 60 years later. The son of Du Yinghua, a local Communist Party county committee secretary executed for his sympathy for the Spark writers, breaks down in tears after laying out copies of his father’s books. Tan Chanxue seems completely at ease—even smiling—as she recalls being herded, bound, through throngs of schoolchildren brought to witness and cheer the Spark members’ public outdoor trial. Remarkably, Hu even gets the Tianshui City leader at the time, Tao Yanlie, to admit that authorities prevented people from leaving town, while 100,000 residents died of hunger. Their deaths, he says, were “recorded but useless. We had...