It’s now 50 years since Chairman Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This brilliantly lucid film, made in 2003, explores with unsparing detail that extraordinary era in modern China. It includes frank, moving interviews with many of the key survivors, some of whom have never spoken on the record before, including the widow of the scapegoat President Liu Shaoqi and the daughter of a Communist Party veteran Li Rui who was driven into exile by the Red Guards. The film amasses rare, gripping, unique footage of every twist and turn of this volcanic period of sweeping change. It features voices from every part of the spectrum of the age of the "poet and the executioner".
Many former Red Guards, some of them still needing to speak from the shadows, cannot quite believe how they were sucked along by the irresistible momentum into acts of great violence and cruelty by the relentless propaganda of Chairman Mao.
