To Remember History: Hu Jie Talks about His Documentaries

By Dilip -
Hu Jie’s independent filmmaking is different from that of other independent filmmakers, especially documentary filmmakers, because Hu Jie consciously uses documentary film as a means to challenge official Chinese historical narratives while providing visual details in order to, in Hu Jie’s own words, “remember history”. In Looking for Lin Zhao’s Soul, the history that is ‘remembered’ is the Chinese Communist Party’s political persecution of intellectuals & Lin Zhao’s courage against the absolute totalitarianism of Mao’s China..

SR: How did you discover Lin Zhao?
HJ: Actually I discovered her story by chance. One day a few friends and I were hanging out. One of them said his parents were Lin Zhao’s classmates. I asked who Lin Zhao was. He told me that Lin Zhao was a student at Beijing University in the 1950s. Because of some poems, she was arrested and put in gaol. In gaol she continued writing. She did not have any ink, so she wrote many things with her blood. In the end, she was executed.
His words were simple but very shocking to me. I had never heard this kind of story: that one was arrested for writing poetry and killed for writing books with blood. I never thought that in Mao’s China there was this kind of people who would fight against the Communist Party, literally with blood. I thought that writing with blood could only write a few characters, but I was told that Lin Zhao wrote thousands and thousands characters with blood.
This story was so shocking that I began to collect information and materials about Lin Zhao. I wanted to know her.
By then I was working at the Centre for Pictures of Xinhua News Agency. I had worked there less than three years, shooting those short films about migrant workers. After I began to conduct research about Lin Zhao, one day my boss in Xinhua News Agency talked to me and told me that I could not work there anymore. He was very serious and said, “What you are doing, you know best. We do not want to know. You have two choices. One is to be fired from your job; the other is to resign by yourself.” I thought it would be terrible to be fired, so I chose to resign. They did not tell me why, but I know clearly: I was doing research on Lin Zhao. They also told me that they did like me very much because I was one of the major hands at the Centre, but they could not allow me to continue working there due to pressure from above. Who is above Xinhua News Agency? I understand that must be The Bureau of Public Safety.

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