Director‘s Statement:
We pay attention to history, not for history itself, but to see how a period of history affects the lives of a group of people.
This determines the way the film cuts into history by recording the present.
We tried to make this film to let people realize that these educated youth groups, representing the most successful generation of the Communist Party, have been fighting against the government for decades, and they are complicated and ambiguous with this country. Qing relationship.
In this relationship, the so-called historical issues are only appearances, but their real core is emotional injury, an emotional trauma abandoned by the state.
In this regard, what the film is trying to share with the audience may not be the obscured history, but through that history, the viewer can establish an emotional connection with the viewer.
In order to shoot this eight-and-a-half-hour documentary, Zhao Chuan, Wu Meng, and Gao Zipeng initiated and established an imaging practice group - “Shanghai—Fudajie”, whose purpose is to explore the possibility of folk video.
Since 2009, they have facilitated the early shooting in Shanghai. During this period, they also went to Xinjiang twice to shoot. The entire shooting cycle lasted four years.
Thereafter, after two years of post-editing production, the film was finally completed in April 2015.