Wu Wenguang Program: Public Screening of "Children’s Village"

The University of California, Santa Cruz will have two events centered around the visit of Wu Wenguang, one of China's leading independent documentary makers, and three artists (Zhang Mengqi, Li Xinmin, Zou Xueping) from the Caochangdi Workshop in Beijing.

The first of the events will be a public screening of Children’s Village (2012) by Zou Xueping, part of Caochangdi’s Folk Memory Project on China’s Great Famine (1959-1961), followed by discussion with Wu Wenguang and the Caochangdi artists. Zou Xueping was born in Bingzhou City, Shandong Province, in 1985. In 2009 she graduated from the Department of New Media at the China Fine Arts Academy. She is currently a resident artist at Wu Wenguang's Caochangdi (CCD) Workshop in Beijing. She has completed a documentary series centered on her village, including Mom (2008), The Starving Village (2010), Satiated Village (2011) which won an “Award of Excellence” at Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012, Children's Village (2012) and Trash Village (2013). Wu Wenguang, a veteran of independent documentary in China, launched his Folk Memory Project in 2010. Since then, he and a group of young filmmakers in Caochangdi Workshop in Beijing have been traveling to their home villages across China to find traces — through oral history interviews — of the memory of the Great Famine of 1959-1961. Through documentary films, oral history archives, and theatre performances, they have tried to locate and preserve another narrative of this historical period than the one recorded in history books.

For more information on the second event, click here.