The Epic of the Central Plains

The Epic of the Central Plains, a documentary film directed by Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie that deals with the spread of HIV/AIDS in China, will be screened at Harvard University.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in an attempt to stop the spread of AIDS, the Chinese government sought a “purer” blood supply from its rural population. Burdened by agricultural taxes and rising costs of education and health care, many peasants sold blood to state and private blood-collectors. Due to lack of sanitary control, a large number of blood-sellers were infected with HIV. Starting from the mid-1990s, AIDS villages multiplied.

In The Epic of the Central Plains (122 min., Chinese with English subtitles), made by Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie, two veteran filmmakers with extensive involvement in political filmmaking, AIDS villages are portrayed not as isolated spaces of private suffering, but as connected spaces for political mobilization. Ai's and Hu’s film creates a cinematic space shared by people from various social backgrounds and living in both cities and the countryside, brought together by the circulation of the virus. Peasants who sold blood, urban families who got infected from blood transfusions, doctors who advocated for both kinds of patients, and the filmmakers form a network of activists seeking redress from an unresponsive government.

Discussion follows the screening
Free and open to the public