Remembering the Great Leap Famine: Two Documentaries from the Post-1980s Generation

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University hosts two documentaries on how the Great Leap famine from 1959-1961 is remembered in China today.

How is the Great Leap famine from 1959-1961 remembered in China today? Based at the Caochangdi workstation in Beijing, the Folk Memory Documentary Project has since 2010 dispatched young filmmakers to family villages to ask elderly people about the famine, a catastrophe only glossed over in history textbooks. Emergent Visions will present two of these films that chronicle their journeys to retrieve and transmit dying memories. In Luo Village (2011, 79 min), Luo Bing searches for an elusive memoir by his neighbor Grandpa Ren while contemplating the meaning of memory in voiceover.  Grandpa Ren introduces him to other survivors of the famine, whose halting, inchoate testimonies are often interrupted shrilly by their adult children. In Satiated Village (2011, 88 min), Zou Xueping, despite fierce opposition by her family, summons the elderly and children of her village to screenings of the video testimonies she collected on the famine and to discuss whether the film should be screened abroad. Chinese with English subtitles

Discussant: Jie Li, Harvard University