Man in Black

At the centre of the documentary is Wang Xilin. Xilin is a Chinese composer. He is eighty six years old. In the years of the Cultural Revolution he was made a target. He was beaten, imprisoned and tortured. Years later he left his country. The film was shot in an empty theatre. The theatre is in Paris. The filming took three days and there was no audience. On the stage the composer tells what he lived through. Between the passages his own symphonies are heard. The account stands between documentary and stage work. The camera stays fixed in the hall. The film was shown at Cannes. The composer lives in Germany today. Wang Xilin appears in the sixty minute documentary, a French, Hong Kong, British and American coproduction Wang Bing finished in 2023.