PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Wang Bing, director of the film Dead Souls.

To listen to the interview, click on the ► icon on the right, just above the picture

FRED’s own Chiara Nicoletti meets Chinese documentary director Wang Bing, who is back after winning at the last Locarno Film Festival with Mrs Fang, to talk about Dead Souls, the 8h 16′ long documentary, special screening at the 71 st Festival de Cannes, that Bing realized on the survivors of the camps of 1957. The director discusses the impact of this documentary in his country. Wang Bing also comments on the critics’ response to the length of the film and its being too long preventing people from going to watch a film. What’s the role of documentary filmmakers today? Wang Bing answers in depth.

Dead Souls: In Gansu Province, northwest China, lie the remains of countless prisoners abandoned in the Gobi Desert sixty years ago. Designated as “ultra-rightists” in the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957, they starved to death in the Jiabiangou and Mingshui reeducation camps. The film invites us to meet the survivors of the camps to find out firsthand who these persons were, the hardships they were forced to endure and what became their destiny.

For the page of the film on the Festival website, click here.