Hu Jie

Spark was an underground publication that emerged in Gansu province in 1960, and was centered on the ongoing famine and the Great Leap Forward. Ultimately, 43 people, including the Rightist teachers and students who were connected with the publication, the peasants and the rural cadres who sympathized with them, were arrested and given long prison terms. Among them, three key figures were executed during the Cultural Revolution.

This landmark documentary reveals the tragic life of a gifted young woman who was executed for speaking out during the height of Chairman Mao’s rule.

This is a short documentary about a daughter who has been searching for the truth about her father’s death during the Cultural Revolution, but whom has found nothing.

Unreleased Hu Jie film.

In the years before 1995, young artists who pursued free creativity came from all over the country to Yuanmingyuan, in the western suburbs of Beijing. These people settled in the rental houses of the village farmers, and then ambitiously bought paint-stretched canvases to explore and create art. The biggest difficulty they face is to make up for the monthly rent to be paid to the landlord. Selling paintings is not their only means of survival; they would also rely on other crafts to maintain their lives. Their works were very different; they have a spirit of rebellion, and they do not conform to traditional aesthetics. This is what caused Sate officials to intervene. (Shot May–December 1995.)

Filmmaker Hu Jie uncovers the tragic story of a teacher beaten to death by her students during the Cultural Revoution. In 1966, the Cultural Revolution exploded throughout China, as Mao's Red Guards persecuted suspected Rightists. Bian Zhongyun, the vice principal of a prestigious school in Beijing, was beaten to death by her own students, becoming one of the first victims of the revolutionary violence that would engulf the entire nation.

Tayuan is the location of the first museum of the Cultural Revolution in China. However, this important Cultural Revolution museum was established with private funds. The reason for its construction here is that there is a tomb of the victims of the Cultural Revolution. This film documents the little-known massacre and the construction of the Cultural Revolution Museum in Shantou, Guangdong during the Cultural Revolution. However, a few years later, this museum was banned by the government.

Because of difficulties where they live in the north east of China, a husband and wife go back to their hometown in Shandong Province and settle in their hometown by the sea with three children. With no land of their own, they have to face the sea, and start their life again.

Unreleased film by Hu Jie, shot between 2009 and 2016, editing completed in November 2023. This film takes as its central thread the experiences of Mr. Yao Jianfu and his parents during “Red August,” in the early period of the Cultural Revolution, and uses interviews with former Red Guards as a secondary line. Together, these elements present the Red Guard movement in the initial stage of the Cultural Revolution.

This is a documentary about coal miners. In the Qilian mountains of Qinghai Province, where the altitude is over 3,600 meters and the air thin, there are numerous small coal mines in which work around 200 miners aged 17 to 50. Every day, they must crawl through pits 60 to 70 metres deep just to carry out 30 loads of coal. Each load weighs 50 kilograms. The miners earn 500 yuan a month, without insurance. Miners normally suffer from pneumoconiosis after working four or five years in the mine and cannot work thereafter. They usually spend their wages on building houses, marriage, and tuition fees for their children. If they die in an accident, their family receives a 5,000 yuan pension. This film is a record of these working conditions, and of human labour. (Shot June 1995.)

The launch and development of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution not only has a series of CCP Central Committee documents that have promoted wave after wave of movements, but also has various propaganda methods. A large number of different types of literary and artistic products have been produced in a collective form and with the input of the State. As a weapon of revolutionary struggle, works of art are important representatives of this period. Art was a tool for the Cultural Revolution; it fully embodies its aesthetic characteristics, actively cooperating with the development of various movements and the popularization of ideas. It has cultivated the values ​​and visual experience of a generation of Chinese people — the paintings of the Cultural Revolution have been regarded as treasures by Chinese collectors. This film shows the characteristics of the Cultural Revolution paintings through a large number of paintings, as well as the bloody violence and despotism behind them.

Contemporary art has become a trend for young people in China. Young artists often organize activities in the form of art groups or small groups — but this is not only looked down on by the government, but is also subject to punishments and restrictions. This film documents a gathering of more than 200 artists in Nanjing, all from different regions of China, who to engage in a modern art activity titled "Bask in the sunshine."

Hu County, in suburban Xi’an, is famous for its peasant paintings, produced in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward. It became particularly famous during the Cultural Revolution, when these works were hailed as model paintings. In 2005, the directors visited the county and interviewed both the painters and their teachers. Comparing different political languages and artistic imaginings across the ages, the film draws on diverse sources: old documentary film clips, new propaganda paintings, Beijing Opera in the local “Qin” accent, and traces of the old amongst the new. All these elements are engaged to help us better understand the painters and the phenomenon of propaganda paintings

Zhou Hao's father was criticized and beaten during the Cultural Revolution. Though he was born with a congenital intellectual disability, Zhou Hao's parents loved him very much, and created a unique world with his unique talent for imitation. Since he was a child, Zhou Hao attended church with his grandmother, so he was able to recite passages from the bible despite never having been to school. Because he tries to persuade people to love each other, everyone calls him Little Angel. Now, he is more than 30 years old. In rural house churches where many people are illiterate, Zhou Hao has become their preacher. In this film, the camera observes the adult child, situating his behavior in the context of a real society lacking love and faith. The story captures the concrete influence of the old political madness on an ordinary couple; however, it is this child who still retains innocence and fantasy, reflecting the spiritual deficiencies and the absurdity of secular society.

Original version of Hu Jie's film The Vast Suffering (辽阔之痛).

In order to find such a fittingly inspiring matchmaker, the director visited nearly 10 matchmakers and finally selected the matchmaker in the film. The director then followed the matchmaker and witnessed the vicissitudes of life. In addition to the land, there is no form of art that can describe the heaviness of life and emotion. (Shot August 1995)

This film tells the story of a war in Tibet in 1912 through information and descendants of the Western Expeditionary Army.

This film demonstrates the characteristics of Cultural Revolution art through a large number of paintings during the Cultural Revolution, and presents the unique experience of the individuals behind the posters.

In 1959, a group of intellectual “Rightists” from colleges and universities in Shenyang, and criminals from prisons, arrived in the desolate area of western Liaoning Province. They wanted to build a railway here for a mine. Taking the fate of Yin Shaoyao, a lecturer at Liaoning University, as its focus, this film records this group’s experience of being labelled as rightists, of “Reform through Labour”, of being starved, and killed. Their personal files reveal the details of their transformation: their personalities encouraged them to betray each other, incriminating materials were put in their files, and their political lives were destroyed. Ideological reformation killed their spirit, while physical labour and hunger destroyed their bodies. The film also records how people who resisted were suppressed and what happened to people’s humanity in this most cruel of environments.

Despite the increasing number of people entering the field of documentary filmmaking, historical subjects are less popular due to limited materials and the difficulty in handling them. Hu Jie has chosen to stay in this field and work hard. "I know that shooting these historical subjects is very dangerous, so how can you ask others to do it? It can only be their choice after they have seen your work." Since 2014, due to health reasons, Hu Jie has not been actively making documentaries. This year, in response to an invitation from the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foundation, he still provided the film "A Sidelight of the 1968 Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement." Over the past three years, he has primarily engaged in printmaking, producing about 70 to 80 pieces, in addition to many small print bookplates.

This documentary records the journey of Zhang Xianchi from a communist Chinese soldier to a prisoner and a writer of independent mind, in some ways just like Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer. Mr. Zhang’s book, The Anecdotes of Gelagu, takes us to China’s gulag---a Sichuan laogai camp. The book details an unknown and atrocious episode of history, allowing us to witness human nature under extreme circumstances.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, in an attempt to stop the spread of AIDS, the Chinese government sought a “purer” blood supply from its rural population. Burdened by agricultural taxes and rising costs of education and health care, many peasants sold blood to state and private blood-collectors. Due to lack of sanitary control, a large number of blood-sellers were infected with HIV. Starting from the mid-1990s, AIDS villages multiplied.

In order to participate in "International Day Against Violence to Women," in 2003, Eve Ensler pioneering feminist drama was adapted by teachers and students of the Sun Yat-sen University Gender Education Forum in Mainland China, adding an artistic interpretation of the gendered experiences of Chinese women. It was performed at the Guangdong Museum of Art. But in a country that talks publicly about sex changes, teachers and students encountered responses they could not have imagined. This film records what happened to these teachers and students following the performance of The Vagina Monologues.

A folk song echoed on the Shandong Plain. This is the song of Luo Xiaojia, a Yunnan Yi girl who was trafficked to the Shandong Plain at the age of 17, and now she has lived in rural Shandong for seven years. After coming to Shandong, she was forced to marry a young farmer and received a marriage certificate. The film documents her family life in the unfamiliar Shandong countryside, her thoughts about her hometown and her views on destiny. Luo Xiaojia's tenth year in Shandong Province, she finally won the right to go home. After a journey of 4,000 kilometers, she returned to her hometown of Yunnan and saw her mother who she missed day and night. But she was caught in a contradiction. Finally, she asked her mother to sing a lot of folk songs for her, and she returned to Shandong with those sad folk songs.