Dead Souls

In Gansu province in northwest China, at the edge of the Gobi desert, stood the camps known as Jiabiangou. People declared rightists in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 were sent there for re-education; between 1958 and 1961 more than three thousand were interned and only around five hundred came out alive, the rest having starved to death. From 2005 onwards Wang Bing spent more than a decade finding survivors one by one, gathering some hundred and twenty testimonies and close to six hundred hours of footage. The documentary is an eight-hour selection from that, made almost entirely of elderly people talking in their own homes, with no narrator, no music and no archive material. Now and then the camera turns to a burial ground and the bones left on the sand. It screened at Cannes in 2018.