Film Screening:

Summary of Crimes

(Xu Xing, 2014, 135 min, China, in Mandarin w/ English subtitles, Color, DVD)

-- Q&A to follow w/ director Xu Xing

A film about farmers who were labelled as "counter-revolutionaries" due to careless talk or accidental actions during the Cultural Revolution. By visiting almost all the countryside in Zhejiang Province, Xu found 13 farmers whose lives were destroyed after they were labeled as "counter-revolutionaries." Most of them were never able to shake off the stigma even after the movement was condemned in the late 1970s and many people rehabilitated. The fear of power created during the persecutions has never disappeared among these farmers. Xu said that "We've heard of stories about famous people being criticized and punished during the Cultural Revolution, but we seldom hear about ordinary farmers' experiences."

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