Dead Souls

Dead Souls screens for free at UT’s Downtown Gallery. Times listed below.

With the 2002 release of West of the Tracks, his nine-hour study of a struggling industrial district near the North Korean border, Wang Bing established himself as the premier documentarian of the economic, political, and cultural shifts that have transformed China in the early years of the 21st century. Named one of the twenty greatest documentaries of all time by Sight & Sound magazine, West of the Tracks introduced what have become his formal trademarks, most notably his telling of epic stories on a small, human scale. In the twenty films he has made since, Wang has investigated a wildly diverse range of subjects, including the oil and coal industries, China’s mental health system, farming life in remote villages, the dying process, and civil war, always in sympathy with those most directly affected.

We’re proud to present this rare installation of Wang’s 2018 masterwork, Dead Souls, which recounts the lost history of China’s reeducation camps through the voices of some of its last remaining survivors. Between 1957 and 1959, tens of thousands of people who had been deemed “ultra-rightists” by the Communist Party were relocated to Gansu Province, where they toiled and starved in the Gobi Desert. Filmed in secret over the course of a decade, Wang’s interviews share harrowing and deeply moving stories that have never before been told publicly.

Dead Souls typically screens in a theater with two intermissions. We will be showing it in a single, uninterrupted block. Hearing even a single story is time well spent.

Screening Times

Wednesday, March 6, 2019
9:30-6:00

Thursday, March 14, 2019
9:30-6:00

Friday, March 22, 2019
11:00-7:30