506 minutes / Color
Mandarin / English subtitles
Release: 2018
Copyright: 2018
An Icarus Films and Grasshopper Film Release.
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.
DEAD SOULS premiered as a Special Screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to rapturous reviews. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman compared it to Shoah as “a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony.” Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, Clarence Tsui remarked that a “thoroughly focused and tightly structured” quality makes it the director’s “most explosive outing.” Sight & Sound called it “a monumental achievement.”
“DEAD SOULS joins such works as Claude Lanzmann’s SHOAH and Patricio Guzman’s THE BATTLE OF CHILE as a vast memorial to the state of barbarity.” —The New York Review of Books
“Weighty and mindfully austere, DEAD SOULS shines a bright and steady spotlight into a dark corner of 20th century Chinese history.” —Film Comment
“Explosive; charting the origins, operations, and outcomes of a far-flung Chinese labor camp in the late 1950s/early 1960s, the documentary offers affecting and harrowing accounts from those who survived the gulag. Thoroughly focused and tightly structured, it is an immensely perceptive piece about the history of China and its multitude of discontents.” —The Hollywood Reporter
“An indispensable primary source document; essential for future generations.” —Critical Asian Studies
Select Accolades
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