Dead Souls
Directed by Wang Bing
China, 2018
8h 15m
Jan 12 – Jan 13, 2019
The Northwest Film Forum and Yellow Fish Festival co-present, Dead Souls, sponsored by the Confucius Institute of the State of Washington
In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Deemed “ultra-rightists” in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the Jiabiangou and Mingshui reeducation camps.
Filmed from 2005 to 2017 and expanding on Wang’s Fengming (2007) and The Ditch (2010), the eight-hour epic Dead Souls invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure, and what became their destiny.
“Interwoven are rugged, haunting shots of the desert today, both a silent witness and the unmarked mass grave of those who cannot be interviewed. With an eye for the everyday and an affection for the long-winded, Wang Bing (Ta-ang, SDAFF ’16) shows that when haunted by the unspeakable, survival is but a mundane miracle. At over eight hours, DEAD SOULS translates that banality into duration and digression, conforming to no documentary format except that which honors the time of those who lend us their memories.” – Brian Hu, San Diego Asian Film Festival
AM I WILLING TO DIE?
Musings on the politics of generosity and sacrifice in durational performance
Within the context of performance, generosity, and sacrifice may intersect, however, I propose that they are not the same; nor are they are interchangeable as one can and often does exist without the other. This writing is an attempt to consider both in the context of performance and is an exploration of the role that sacrifice plays in durational performance.
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