Extended introduction with Wang Bing

Wang Bing’s latest is a monumental work of testimony, largely comprised of interviews with survivors of the Jiabiangou and Mingshui re-education camps of the late 1950s, which were set up in the Gobi Desert to imprison alleged reactionaries and anti-Communists a decade after China’s revolution in 1949. In making Dead Souls, Wang interviewed over 100 survivors from almost all of China’s provinces, recording traumatic memories, melancholic recollections and sober reflections on political repression in the country prior to the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. As with all of Wang’s work, Dead Souls is both an engrossing epic and a profound moral act in and of itself. A Grasshopper Film and Icarus Films release.

Note: There will be two 30-minute intermissions.