Event

Dead Souls

Sat Jan 12: 12.00pm
Sun Jan 13: 12.00pm

Wang Bing
China
2018
8h 15m

About
** Co-presented with Yellow Fish Durational Performance Art Festival! Your ticket for this 8-hour film is valid for both days with in and out privileges. PLUS: Free popcorn refills for all! **

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 Partys Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the Jiabiangou and Mingshui reeducation camps.

Filmed from 2005 to 2017 and expanding on Wangs 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.

Wangs film is a vital excavation of history in danger of being eroded away. Phil Hoad, The Guardian

a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony. Owen Gleiberman, Variety

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