PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Wang Bing, directorof the filmDead Souls.
FRED’s own Chiara Nicoletti meets Chinese documentary director Wang Bing, who is back after winning at the last Locarno Film Festival with Mrs Fang, to talk about Dead Souls, the 8h 16′ long documentary, special screening at the 71 st Festival de Cannes, that Bing realized on the survivors of the camps of 1957. The director discusses the impact of this documentary in his country. Wang Bing also comments on the critics’ response to the length of the film and its being too long preventing people from going to watch a film. What’s the role of documentary filmmakers today? Wang Bing answers in depth.
Dead Souls: In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as “ultra-rightists” in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the Jiabiangou and Mingshui reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.
For the page of the film on the Festival website, click here.
Michel Franco about "Dreams" : 'When the father says "It’s okay to help immigrants, but there are limits," that’s the biggest question in the film: can people [from different contexts] truly see each other as equals?'
"Future Future" director Davi Pretto: 'The apocalypse is not what Hollywood says it is, a huge bang. That's not the apocalypse. The apocalypse is happening every day.'
'The screenplay of "They Come Out of Margo"', says director Alexandros Voulgaris, 'started with another composer, then it became personal, and then it also became about female artists in the 70s and 80s.'
"Bidad" director Soheil Beiraghi: 'A lot is happening in Iran: there is life, their is beauty, and there is a happiness around, and we need to portray that.'