Chinese filmmaker stuns Cannes Film Festival with documentary revealing horrors of Mao’s gulags

Clocking in at more than eight hours, Wang Bing’s latest outing, Dead Souls, is probably one of the longest films to have taken a bow at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered on Wednesday, in two parts, with an hour-long intermission in between. The work’s length is, in a way, a reflection of Wang’s own odyssey in completing the documentary. Based on interviews and footage he gathered over 13 years, Dead Souls recon­structs the pain and suffering of those condemned to “re-education” – a euphemism for hard labour – in a gulag in northwestern China at the start of Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign, in 1957.

via http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/arts-music/article/2145299/chinese-filmmaker-stuns-cannes-film-festival