Dead Souls

From The dGenerate Films Collection

Directed by Wang Bing

506 minutes / Color
Mandarin / English subtitles
Release: 2018
Copyright: 2018

film poster

 An Icarus Films and Grasshopper Film Release.

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.

DEAD SOULS premiered as a Special Screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to rapturous reviews. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman compared it to Shoah as “a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony.” Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, Clarence Tsui remarked that a “thoroughly focused and tightly structured” quality makes it the director’s “most explosive outing.” Sight & Sound called it “a monumental achievement.”

“DEAD SOULS joins such works as Claude Lanzmann’s SHOAH and Patricio Guzman’s THE BATTLE OF CHILE as a vast memorial to the state of barbarity.” —The New York Review of Books

 “Weighty and mindfully austere, DEAD SOULS shines a bright and steady spotlight into a dark corner of 20th century Chinese history.” —Film Comment

 “Explosive; charting the origins, operations, and outcomes of a far-flung Chinese labor camp in the late 1950s/early 1960s, the documentary offers affecting and harrowing accounts from those who survived the gulag. Thoroughly focused and tightly structured, it is an immensely perceptive piece about the history of China and its multitude of discontents.” —The Hollywood Reporter

“An indispensable primary source document; essential for future generations.” —Critical Asian Studies

Ways to Watch

Available online from:

Colleges, Universities, Government Agencies, Hospitals, and Corporations

Purchase DVD for $440.00

Credits

A film by Wang Bing

Select Accolades

  • 2018 Cannes Film Festival
  • 2018 Toronto Internationl Film Festival

RELATED TITLES

Documents China's rapid economic and social transformation by following the rural workers who leave their Yunnan hometown to move to the city of Huzhou to work in its textile factories.

Wang Bing | 2017 | 152 minutes | Color | Mandarin | English subtitles

The daily life of Ta'ang refugees, a Burmese ethnic minority who are caught between a civil war and the Chinese border.

Wang Bing | 2017 | 147 minutes | Color | Burmese; Mandarin; English | English subtitles

Three little sisters live alone in a small village in the high mountains of the Yunnan region. The little girls don't go to school, spending their days working in the fields or wandering in the village.

Wang Bing | 2016 | 153 minutes | Color | English; Mandarin | English subtitles

The daily lives and isolation of a group of men locked on one floor of a Chinese city's psychiatric institution.

Wang Bing | 2016 | 238 minutes | Color | English; Mandarin | English subtitles