The Hundred Flowers

'Let a hundred flowers bloom' is the slogan of Mao Zedong, which he used to launch an extensive campaign among Chinese intellectuals in 1957 calling for publicity and productive criticism of the government. However, having lasted no more than a year, it was wound up and eventually turned into a persecution and brutal repression of the opposition. It was then that the first laogai — 'reform through labor' camps and farms — were created. Traces, the only film by Wang Bing shot with the 35mm camera, depicts remnants of the Jiabangou and Mingshui camps in Gansu Province of China. The famous filmmaker makes a kind of visual cast of these sites of memory in search of traces of dramatic events related to mass hunger and cases of cannibalism. According to some historians, the campaign against the 'right-wing deviation' was the prerequisite of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted in China between 1966 and 1976. Breathless Animals by the Chinese director Lei Lei refers to the historical memory of this period differently — through the method of oral history. His attempt to recreate the experience of the day-to-day life during the complex social experiment is based on interviews with a witness and old photographs. However, Lei Lei demonstrates the work of memory, which is fragile by nature.

The film was shot on the site of the former camp of Mingshui at Zhang Ye in Gansu Province and on the site of the former camp of Jiabiangou at Jiuquan. In 2005, while doing preparatory on his film The Ditch, Wang Bing travelled to the Gobi Desert to the exact same places where thousands of people lived and died in the 'reeducation-through-labour' camps set up by the communist regime in the late 50s. He shot the site with a 35mm camera, depicting the scenes of desert and abandoned bones – a landscape doomed to disappear. Digitized and revised later, these images now provide excellent evidence of the events of those times, which have been virtually buried until 2010s.

«What did you dream about and how was your life as a teenager?» A woman recalls her youthful memories of her 1970's, while the re-creation of the modernity of the past of China unfolds in front of our eyes. One day, the first animal appears to her, a White horse...