Performance by Four Filmmakers:

"Reading Hunger"

Conception & Direction: Wu Wenguang
Text, documentaries & performers: Zhang Mengqi, Zhang Ping, Liu Xiaolei, Wu Wenguang
Duration: 70 minutes
Production: Caochangdi Workstation

About the performance:

Chinese Documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang launched the Memory Project in 2010 to collect oral histories from survivors of one of modern China's most traumatic episodes, the Great Famine (1958-1961) in rural China. Since then, several young filmmakers have joined the project. They have been to 246 villages in 20 provinces and interviewed more than 1,220 elderly villagers. The amateur filmmakers from Wu’s studio discovered their family histories and identities in the process of interviewing the villagers, reconciling the official history taught in schools with each family’s true experiences.

For this project, the performers took video cameras and went back to their respective villages. They went in search of the old generation that was still living there in dim, stark houses, to uncover the memories hidden deep inside them. For the elderly in the villages, this was the first time anyone had come to ask them to open their memory chests. This is their story. 

Cost: Free and open to the public

Sponsors: The Memory Project Artists in Residence is presented by Duke University Libraries; co-sponsored by the Department of Theater Studies, 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).