GET 50% OFF YOUR FIRST YEAR!

Limited time - use promo code: ANNUAL at checkout

Live stream preview

Watch this video and more on OVID.tv

Watch this video and more on OVID.tv

Start your free trial

Already subscribed? Sign in

Fengming, a Chinese Memoir

Wang Bing • 3h 4m

Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2017 • 184 minutes

Often cited as one of the great documentary achievements, Wang Bing’s dazzling tour-de-force — a gripping monologue recounting five decades in the life of a once-ardent socialist in the new China — is a testament to the power of oral history and the strength of one extraordinary woman.

"A heartbreaking, scathing documentary... The film has a moral authority similar to that of Shoah, to which it ingeniously alludes." —The New Yorker

"Gripping. A sweeping saga. Fengming stands alongside first-person precedents like Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason and Errol Morris’s The Fog of War in its ability to wrest powerful effects from the deceptively simple setup of a lone raconteur." —Artforum

"In his masterful, West of the Tracks, Wang Bing used a rural freight railway as a conduit into China's uneasy transition from a planned to a market economy. In this equally remarkable follow-up, he finds in a single room, and in He Fengming's harrowed eyes, another uncanny metaphor for individual lives undone by the dreams of nations." —Village Voice

Tags
cannes, china, complex, docuseek2, elderly, expository, family, fengming, fengming: a chinese memoir, grasshopper films, hard labor, housing, humiliation, journalism, journalist, memoir, night, ovid, ovid_ca, re-education camp, right-wing, seperation, slow, snow, socialism, starvation, title_defgh, title_f, wang bing, woman

Up Next in Wang Bing

  • Ta'ang
    2:26:46
    Ta'ang

    Ta'ang

    Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2016 • 147 minutes

    Director Wang Bing brings his careful eye to the mountainous border-region of northeastern Myanmar in Ta’ang, a powerful and revealing observational documentary that follows members of the Ta’ang minority as they flee to China to escape an...

  • Three Sisters
    2:33:08
    Three Sisters

    Three Sisters

    Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2012 • 153 minutes

    One of his generation's most important documentary filmmakers, director Wang Bing is at the height of his powers in THREE SISTERS. The film introduces viewers to 10-year-old YingYing, 6-year-old Zhenzhen and 4-year-old Fenfen, who live alo...

  • 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    3:48:28
    'Til Madness Do Us Part

    'Til Madness Do Us Part

    Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2013 • 238 minutes

    Within the gates of an isolated mental institution in in southwest China's Yunnan province, patients are confined to one single floor of a building. Once locked in, with little contact from the outside world, anything goes.

    The facility's...

×