On April 29, 1968, in the height of the “Cultural Revolution”, on the basketball court of a prison in Shanghai, a young intellectual, who had been detained for several years, was tied up and gagged. Then she was shot, without it being clear, even today, where or how she was executed, after what order, from what leader. A few years earlier, this young student had spoken at her university to express doubts about the ongoing “revolutionary criticism campaign”. It was for this reason that she was arrested, held in solitary confinement, in a cell (where she was deprived of paper and pen). Her father committed suicide shortly after her arrest. Her mother died on the streets in suspicious conditions shortly after her execution. The film reconstructs, thanks to a few witnesses, the years of incessant torture and Lin Zhao’s texts (written with her blood since she had no ink). (Hu Jie)
Hu Jie
Acclaimed internationally for his paintings and woodcuts as well as an oeuvre of more than 30 hard-hitting historical political documentaries, Hu Jie is one of China's leading contemporary artists. Widely credited as the first native artist to frankly depict China's “Great Famine” and the deadly work camps of the late 1950s and early 1960s, his work focuses on individuals who have risked—or lost—their lives to tell the truth about the horrors they endured during the “Cultural Revolution” and “Great Leap Forward”.
