Film Screening:

A Chronicle of My Cultural Revolution 

(Xu Xing, 2008, 121 min, in Mandarin w/ English subtitles, Color, DVD) 

-- Q&A to follow w/ director Xu Xing

Shot over two years, this documentary includes several personal stories that took place during the Cultural Revolution, starting with the director's own love story. When he was 16, he wrote a love letter to a girl in the same school, and didn't sign his name. The girl, frightened, gave the letter to her teacher who then found out about the writer. Xu was labelled a "counter-revolutionary" because of the letter and was sent to prison. In other stories, the interviewees recount their hilarious yet terrible experiences during the Cultural Revolution.

About the filmmaker:

XU Xing  徐星  (b. 1956 in Beijing) is a writer, documentary film maker and public intellectual currently residing in Beijing. As a writer he became iconic in the 1980s with his work Variations Without a Theme (无主题变奏), that defined the mood of the Chinese youth of that period. During the Cultural Revolution, Xu was left by himself as a child – his parents had been sent far away for re-education – and he traveled and wandered in many distant places of China.  Xu emigrated for Germany in 1989, and didn’t return for four years. He revisited his experiences as a rebellious youth in the early 70s in one of his recent documentaries. In his novels and documentaries he employs fierce irony and consistently focuses on people on the fringe of society, left behind by rapid development in China. His work has been translated into French, German, English and Italian.

Cost: Free and open to the public

Sponsors: The Asian Pacific Studies Institute (APSI), the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), and the Asian & Middle Eastern Studies program (AMES)