The Ditch

Winter 1960, the Gobi Desert. In a labour camp called Jiabiangou, men sent there for being counted as rightist elements live in shelters dug into the ground. There is almost nothing to eat, the cold is past bearing, and death has become an everyday thing. The film records their days without dressing them up and without losing its distance. Wang Bing's first fiction feature draws on Yang Xianhui's book and on the interviews he made with survivors of the camp. It was shot in secret in the Gobi and entered the 2010 Venice Film Festival as its surprise film. The telling neither lectures nor dramatises; it is content to show what happened. That makes it hard to watch, but it puts on record a chapter of recent Chinese history that went unspoken for a long time.