Film Screening:

Part of the “Cultural Revolution in Asia and Beyond” Conference at Duke University (Oct. 28-29, 2016):

Investigating My Father 

(Wu Wenguang, 2016, 80 min, China, in Chinese w/English subtitles, Color, Digital) 

-- U.S. Premiere!
-- Q&A to follow with director Wu Wenguang!

Investigating My Father is a film made by a son to investigate his father's history. It documents the process of the son's investigation over twenty years into his father's history before 1949, which he had kept from his son. The father was a landowner's son and an ex-Kuomintang Air Force pilot, who remained in mainland China after 1949. In order to survive, he tried to transform himself from a man of the "old society" to a man of the "new society." Investigating My Father is however not a film just about a father. Since the filmmaker is the subject's son, the film also inevitably tells a story that unfolds between a father and a son.

About the filmmaker:

Wu Wenguang was born in South-Western China’s Yunnan province in 1956. After graduating from high school in 1974, Wu was sent to the countryside, where he worked as a farmer for four years. Between 1978 and 1982, he studied Chinese Literature in Yunnan University. After university, Wu worked as a teacher at a junior high school for three years, and later, he worked in television as a journalist for four years. Wu left television, and moved to Beijing in 1988 to be an independent documentary filmmaker, freelance writer, and creator and producer of dance/theater. Wu has directed several documentaries, including: Bumming in Beijing (1990), 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1993), Jiang Hu: Life on the Road (1999), Fuck Cinema (2005), Treating (2010). In 2005, Wu co-founded the independent art space Caochangdi Workstation with Wen Hui in Beijing. Since then, Wu has founded two main projects: the Village Documentary Project (founded in 2005) and the Folk Memory Project (founded in 2010).

Cost: Free and open to the public

Sponsors: Presented by Duke University Libraries; co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute (APSI), Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES), Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Art (MFA|EDA), and Center for Documentary Studies (CDS).