Chinese filmmaker stuns Cannes Film Festival with documentary revealing horrors of Mao's gulags
Based on interviews and footage he gathered over 13 years, Dead Souls reconstructs the pain and suffering of those condemned to "re-education" - a euphemism for hard labour - in a gulag in northwestern China at the start of Mao Zedong's Anti-Rightist Campaign, in 1957.
Director Wang Bing. Picture: AFP
"The filming of Dead Souls began around the same time as the preparations for my fictional feature The Ditch," says Wang, referring to the 2010 film about Jiabiangou, a labour camp in Gansu province. "I got to know a few people who made it out of the camp alive, and filmed in-depth conversations with them. After that, I thought I should search for all the survivors and conduct thorough interviews with them.
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"It's difficult to look for them, as they are spread across provinces and cities across the country, and connections between them have long been cut," the 51-year-old says. "It was a very tortuous and challenging process, and I managed to talk to 120 people over three years, from 2005 to 2008."
After intermittent subsequent shoots, filming was finally completed in 2017.
Wang says his interviewees could still clearly recall their experiences: "It's incredible and a very precious thing for them to face the camera and describe the conditions at Jiabiangou," he says. "From these tiny fragments of memories, we could reveal the injustice suffered by those who perished there in the Gobi Desert more than five decades ago."
Indeed, many did not live to tell their tale. Of the 3,000 individuals who passed through Jiabiangou, only 500 survived - a tragedy repeated in other labour camps across China in the late 1950s and early 60s, when the country was at once mired in political turmoil (such as the disastrous industrialisation campaigns of the Great Leap Forward) and a nationwide famine.
Chen Zonghai is one of only 500 survivors of Jiabiangou, which saw 3,000 inmates pass through its gates.
As the authorities sought to revise their stance towards the Anti-Rightist Movement - a perspective embodied in a leading academic's claim, in 2013, that "not a single person" died during that calamitous period - officials began to crack down on any discussion of Jiabiangou.
Wang declines to say whether he completed Dead Souls under increased pressure and scrutiny from the state, or if he is worried about repercussions. It's safe to assume, however, that the documentary won't be screened on the mainland any time soon.
Another of Wang's interviewees, Zhou Xiaoli. The director said that every person he spoke to could clearly recall their experiences of the gulag.
Then again, the filmmaker's work has rarely been shown in his native country, largely because of the way his unvarnished representations of marginalised communities run against the national narrative of a powerful, positive China: among his subjects are a declining state-owned factory (Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks [2002]), the rural poor (Three Sisters [2012]), inmates in a mental asylum ('Til Madness Do Us Part [2013]), sweatshop workers (Bitter Money [2016]) and refugees (Ta'ang [2016]).
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Despite his pedigree as one of China's leading independent cineastes on the international art-house circuit - a reputation enhanced by the award he received at the Locarno Film Festival last year for Mrs Fang (2017), a piece about the final days of a woman suffering from Alzheimer's - Wang says he is not concerned about how international audiences perceive his films. His biggest wish now, he says, is to offer audiences a complete, serious and conscientious account of a "comparatively important historical incident".
With Dead Souls, his slow and lonely march through the haze of modern Chinese history looks set to continue.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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