Nov 02, 2018, 16:21 pm
(This post was last modified: Nov 07, 2018, 18:22 pm by workerbee. Edited 3 times in total.)
Dead Souls (死靈魂) is a 2018 documentary film directed by Wang Bing and documents the testimony of survivors of the hard-labor camp in the Gobi Desert in Gansu, China. Shot from 2005 to 2017, and running eight hours in length (!), the film made its world premiere at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Souls_(2018_film)
From a review by James Quandt in the current issue of the New York Review of Books: "Dead Souls revisits the grim subject of Wang’s only fiction film, The Ditch (2010): the deadly 'reeducation' camps that the Chinese Communist Party established in the late 1950s to punish and extirpate the 'Rightists' who had criticized life in China. . . The project of Dead Souls, which includes close to twenty clandestine interviews with some of the few survivors of the Chinese gulags, is not to contribute to the debate over Mao’s intentions but to ensure that the country’s history is honestly and fully witnessed. It joins such works as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (to which Wang’s film has been speciously compared) and Patricio Guzman’s The Battle of Chile as a vast memorial to state barbarity." The full review is attached here as a PDF.
The first comparison that came to my mind after hearing about the film was Solzhenitsyn's monumental Gulag Archipelago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Souls_(2018_film)
From a review by James Quandt in the current issue of the New York Review of Books: "Dead Souls revisits the grim subject of Wang’s only fiction film, The Ditch (2010): the deadly 'reeducation' camps that the Chinese Communist Party established in the late 1950s to punish and extirpate the 'Rightists' who had criticized life in China. . . The project of Dead Souls, which includes close to twenty clandestine interviews with some of the few survivors of the Chinese gulags, is not to contribute to the debate over Mao’s intentions but to ensure that the country’s history is honestly and fully witnessed. It joins such works as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (to which Wang’s film has been speciously compared) and Patricio Guzman’s The Battle of Chile as a vast memorial to state barbarity." The full review is attached here as a PDF.
The first comparison that came to my mind after hearing about the film was Solzhenitsyn's monumental Gulag Archipelago.