He Fengming: A Chinese Memoir

He Fengming: A Chinese Memoir
He Fengming: Cronaca di una donna cinese
China 2007   
directed by 
Wang Bing 
screenplay
Wang Bing 
editing 
Adam Kerby
producer 
Kong Lihong, Louise Prince 
production 
Wil Productions Ltd.,
Aeternam Films,
Fantasy Pictures 
world sales
Wil Productions Ltd. 
format 
Digitalbeta
running time 
184' 

A heartbreaking documentary, directed by Wang Bing, is composed mainly of a nearly three-hour-long interview with an elderly woman, He Fengming, about life in China during Anti-Rightist purge in 1957 and the subsequent Cultural Revolution.

Fragile Fengming recounts dreadful moments when she and her first husband Wang Jingchao, journalists and devoted socialists, were subjected to fearsome “struggle sessions”, publicly denounced and humiliated, separated from their young sons, and sent to labour camps—from which Wang Jingchao did not emerge alive.

A tragic story of Fengming is interwoven into the black scenario of horrific privations as well as lifesaving acts of kindness. Despite the static position of the camera during the interview (camera does not stray from Frengming even when she must use the bathroom), atestimony of the narrator, who has made peace with her destiny, uncovers a story about a broken family as well as constant attempts to compose pieces of life into an incomplete collage, reveals frightful images of the then-China situation and at the same time also a projection into a more up-to-date era, in which situation is softened, but more or less the same.

Introductory scene, the only one shot in the open air, shows how the narrator walks home in silence, metaphorically indicating the state of the current authority in China. In the country that is still ruled by the same party that committed the crimes being recounted, the truth, Wang Bing suggests, can thus still not be spoken in public.  

»It was in 1995 that I first met He Fengming. I learned how she and her family, and many others with destinies similar to her own, lived through the successive political movements that swept China over those long years. Those memories cannot fade, but live in her today, like a specter constantly returning to take us back to that time of extremism and terror, filling me with a growing anxiety.« (Wang Bing)  

Wang Bing
Was born in 1967 in Shaanxi, China. He is considered as one of the most important figures of Chinese history of documentary making. He also founded his own production house Wang Bing Studios that produces most of his films. His break-through was a nine-hour documentary on industrial China, Tie Xi Qu, which won the Grand Prix at the Marseille Festival of Documentary Film.