Hu Jie

Tayuan is the location of the first museum of the Cultural Revolution in China. However, this important Cultural Revolution museum was established with private funds. The reason for its construction here is that there is a tomb of the victims of the Cultural Revolution. This film documents the little-known massacre and the construction of the Cultural Revolution Museum in Shantou, Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution. However, a few years later, this museum was banned by the government.

Dissident artist Hu Jie has managed to make more than 30 documentaries. Films like Though I Am Gone and Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul are vital to understanding Chinese history and society. Widely recognized as the first artist to dare talk about the Great Famine, the labor camps, and the Cultural Revolution, Hu Jie is considered China's first historical documentary filmmakers.

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This landmark documentary reveals the tragic life of a gifted young woman who was executed for speaking out during the height of Chairman Mao’s rule.

This is a short documentary about a daughter who has been searching for the truth about her father’s death during the Cultural Revolution, but whom has found nothing.

The launch and development of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution not only has a series of CCP Central Committee documents that have promoted wave after wave of movements, but also has various propaganda methods. A large number of different types of literary and artistic products have been produced in a collective form and with the input of the State. As a weapon of revolutionary struggle, works of art are important representatives of this period. Art was a tool for the Cultural Revolution; it fully embodies its aesthetic characteristics, actively cooperating with the development of various movements and the popularization of ideas. It has cultivated the values ​​and visual experience of a generation of Chinese people — the paintings of the Cultural Revolution have been regarded as treasures by Chinese collectors. This film shows the characteristics of the Cultural Revolution paintings through a large number of paintings, as well as the bloody violence and despotism behind them.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in an attempt to stop the spread of AIDS, the Chinese government sought a “purer” blood supply from its rural population. Burdened by agricultural taxes and rising costs of education and health care, many peasants sold blood to state and private blood-collectors. Due to lack of sanitary control, a large number of blood-sellers were infected with HIV. Starting from the mid-1990s, AIDS villages multiplied.

This film narrates the tragic events that unfolded at Jiabian Gou Farm from 1958 to December 1960, resulting in the deaths of over two thousand individuals due to exhaustion and starvation. Originally a labor reform farm housing prisoners in Jiuquan City, Gansu Province, Jiabian Gou Farm was transformed in 1958 into a facility for re-educating labor inmates. It also took in over three thousand individuals labeled as rightists from Gansu, including university professors, county-level officials, military officers, professionals from various industries, and teachers from different schools. Amid the political terror of the Great Leap Forward, extravagant claims flourished, and an atmosphere of self-preservation and selective reporting of positive news prevailed. This environment led to instances of cannibalism being overlooked, even as people continued to starve to death.

Despite the increasing number of people entering the field of documentary filmmaking, historical subjects are less popular due to limited materials and the difficulty in handling them. Hu Jie has chosen to stay in this field and work hard. "I know that shooting these historical subjects is very dangerous, so how can you ask others to do it? It can only be their choice after they have seen your work." Since 2014, due to health reasons, Hu Jie has not been actively making documentaries. This year, in response to an invitation from the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foundation, he still provided the film "A Sidelight of the 1968 Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement." Over the past three years, he has primarily engaged in printmaking, producing about 70 to 80 pieces, in addition to many small print bookplates.

Filmmaker Hu Jie uncovers the tragic story of a teacher beaten to death by her students during the Cultural Revoution. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution exploded throughout China, as Mao's Red Guards persecuted suspected Rightists. Bian Zhongyun, the vice principal of a prestigious school in Beijing, was beaten to death by her own students, becoming one of the first victims of the revolutionary violence that would engulf the entire nation.

Wang Keqin was a reporter who dared to expose corrupt officialdom. Because his articles directly exposed stock market corruption and local government brutality to the public, people threatened to pay 500,000 yuan for his head. This attracted the attention of Premier Zhu Rongji. Wang was instructed to employ protection. This film documents Wang Keqin's interview experience in Min County, Gansu Province. Wang Keqin once wrote reports about officials oppressing the people there, which received widespread attention, so the cadres were brought to justice. The general public increased their legal awareness as a result of this incident, which also resulted in challenges to township governance. In the days that followed, the farmers who defended their rights continued to experience retaliation from the village cadres, and they kept calling Wang Keqin about their experiences.

A group of Miao minority Christians live in Maidichong, a small village in a remote mountain area in Yunnan Province. Christianity was brought to them by an English missionary called Samuel Pollard in 1903. Pollard created the Miao script for these villagers and translated the Bible into their language. For years, singing hymns and the gospels have brought joy to these Miao, and carried them though hard time, including the Cultural Revolution. At that time, they were forced to renounce their faith for Communism. Memories of this period remain strong among the villagers, but today, the holy songs once again reverberate through Maidichong, as the villagers’ belief in divine grace never truly disappeared.

A folk song echoed on the Shandong Plain. This is the song of Luo Xiaojia, a Yunnan Yi girl who was trafficked to the Shandong Plain at the age of 17, and now she has lived in rural Shandong for seven years. After coming to Shandong, she was forced to marry a young farmer and received a marriage certificate. The film documents her family life in the unfamiliar Shandong countryside, her thoughts about her hometown and her views on destiny. Luo Xiaojia's tenth year in Shandong Province, she finally won the right to go home. After a journey of 4,000 kilometers, she returned to her hometown of Yunnan and saw her mother who she missed day and night. But she was caught in a contradiction. Finally, she asked her mother to sing a lot of folk songs for her, and she returned to Shandong with those sad folk songs.

This film tells the story of the translator Wang Tiesheng. Before 1949, Wang graduated from Tongji University in Shanghai. He was a student with good morals, intelligence and health. He then served as an assistant professor in the Economics Department of Renmin University. However, he was labelled a “Rightist” in 1957 and was sent to a farm in Tianjin to undertake forced labour. There, he underwent extreme humiliating “reform” and suffered starvation. Later, on a bumpy road as he was being sent to be buried, he miraculously discovered that he was actually alive.

The melody of the hymn echoes in the old streets and alleys of the city. This is strange in a country that regards religion as a spiritual opium. The small, messy street was full of old people, and they began to pray with the sound of the room on the street. On the roof, a simple cross gleamed in the sun. During the Cultural Revolution, Christianity was completely eradicated. In China's political environment, Christianity has always been regarded as an extremely reactionary and evil thing, and openly believing in God would bring prison sentences. After the reform and opening up, Christianity also resumed activities. Although the Three-Self Church under official control is orthodox, house churches that are not under official control have also emerged in various cities. This film documents the activities of a house church in Nanjing.

In the mountains of China's Qinghai Province, there are countless small coal mines. The miners are all rural residents who live nearby, and their bodies are covered in coal dust from all the coal they must dig out each day to earn 500 yuan a month. The film records how they labour, the sounds of their heavy breathing, and what they see working far underground, while cherishing dreams of a better life, such as the kind we live.

By following the case of Huang Jing, a woman teacher who died of date rape, this documentary captures changes in China between 2003 and 2005, before and after the injunction to respect and protect human rights was incorporated into the constitution. By highlighting grassroots activity by women, the film illustrates awareness of human rights, women’s struggle against judicial corruption, and women taking action against domestic violence in China.

Hu County, in suburban Xi’an, is famous for its peasant paintings, produced in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward. It became particularly famous during the Cultural Revolution, when these works were hailed as model paintings. In 2005, the directors visited the county and interviewed both the painters and their teachers. Comparing different political languages and artistic imaginings across the ages, the film draws on diverse sources: old documentary film clips, new propaganda paintings, Beijing Opera in the local “Qin” accent, and traces of the old amongst the new. All these elements are engaged to help us better understand the painters and the phenomenon of propaganda paintings

In order to find such a fittingly inspiring matchmaker, the director visited nearly 10 matchmakers and finally selected the matchmaker in the film. The director then followed the matchmaker and witnessed the vicissitudes of life. In addition to the land, there is no form of art that can describe the heaviness of life and emotion. (Shot August 1995)

Zhou Hao's father was criticized and beaten during the Cultural Revolution. Though he was born with a congenital intellectual disability, Zhou Hao's parents loved him very much, and created a unique world with his unique talent for imitation. Since he was a child, Zhou Hao attended church with his grandmother, so he was able to recite passages from the bible despite never having been to school. Because he tries to persuade people to love each other, everyone calls him Little Angel. Now, he is more than 30 years old. In rural house churches where many people are illiterate, Zhou Hao has become their preacher. In this film, the camera observes the adult child, situating his behavior in the context of a real society lacking love and faith. The story captures the concrete influence of the old political madness on an ordinary couple; however, it is this child who still retains innocence and fantasy, reflecting the spiritual deficiencies and the absurdity of secular society.