In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as “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 research for Fengming (2007) and The Ditch (2010), the eight-hour film covers most of China’s provinces and is crafted from over 600hours of original interview from visits with more than 120 survivors. It 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.
It premiered as a Special Screening at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
(Source: Icarus Films, Moviola Japan)
