Folk Memory Documentary Project: Famine
About the Project
This project’s content is centered on “starvation”, collecting the memories of 220 elderly people who lived through the Great Chinese Famine from 1959-1961. They come from 8 provinces and over 80 villages and cities (though most are rural residents), with ages ranging from 55 to 97. For all of them, it was their first time speaking of these events before a camera.
This project is organized by Caochangdi Workstation, but participants are all volunteers, the oldest 60 and the youngest 19. The title of eldest is shared by Village Documentary Project participants Jia Zhitan, from Hunan, and Shao Yuzhen, from a village outside Beijing. They both live in rural areas. The rest of the volunteers were mostly born after 1980, and either just graduated from college, or are still students. The villages they visited were always intimately tied to the volunteers themselves; either they or their parents were born or raised there, their grandparents reside there, or they were sent there with an army troupe before. For these volunteers, on one level, this is an opportunity for them to return to a village that means something to them. On another level, it invites them to pursue history, with all its disappearances and mysteries, to arrive at the intersection between current reality and a distant past.
Therefore, entangled in these “Folk Memory Documentaries” will be a record of the journey these volunteers have taken during their search.
This is a documentary project undertaken and completed by countless people coming together, those who search and those who are found, the young and the old. Perhaps, this might become a sort of folk memory archive, a base for an ultimate memorial. Most importantly, the Folk Memory Documentary Project will continue, and perhaps this underwater glacier will truly reveal a corner.
Filmmaker’s Words:
I grew up in Huamulin Village. In 2002, when I was fourteen years old, I left to earn money. Seven years later I returned to my village with a video camera, which I had never used before. I tried to film my life in the village and explore my connection to this place. I also interviewed the village elders ab...
Filmmaker’s words:
In 1970, I was nineteen. In the village where I lived then and now, some villagers accused others of being counterrevolutionary. Their accusations were completely fabricated. More than eighty people were involved in the case. Now, forty years later, the villagers don’t mention it (except a very few who st...
Filmmaker’s words:
While searching for the memories that the rest of my family has forgotten, I found my third grandmother. She is my only living relative of my grandparents’ generation. She is my father’s aunt, my great-aunt, but no one ever mentioned her to me. Last winter I discovered her in a village in the mountains of...
Director’s Statement:
This is my first documentary, and marks the start of my new life after graduating from college a year ago. It is a “beginning” in that I went back to Luo Village in Zhuzhou in Hunan Province where I was born and raised. My return was concurrent with the “Folk Memory Project.” I began interviewing ...
Filmmaker’s Words:
I felt I should film my grandfather in order to try to understand him better. I never thought about how my grandfather spent his winters. And now, after making the film, I know more. I know more about his thoughts. About The Filmmaker:
Jia Nannan was born&n...
Director’s Statement:
After I finished my documentary The Hungry Village, I returned to my hometown to screen it for my family. They were unanimously against it. All of them- my parents who were born in the 50s, and my brothers, born in the 70s and 90s—believed it was dangerous to investigate the famine in our village tha...
Synopsis:
This year I turned twenty-three, the age when women become pregnant with dreams. Yet, while nursing our own dreams, we carry the burdens of two other women’s dreams as well. This film began with myself and then branched to my mother and her mother, these women who grew up in such different times. Three generations of ...
Director’s Statement:
This is my second self-portrait film. (The first is Self-portrait with Three Women.) It takes place in a village called 47 KM. It’s called this because it’s located at the 47th kilometer marker on the road from Suizhou in Hubei Province. My father was born there. He left when he was twenty years o...
Filmmaker’s Words:
I was born and raised in the village. Since 2008, I have begun to document my life. Slowly, I began to film my home village. This is my second documentary and it’s about old people. One woman, nearing eighty, is living out the last two years of her life. From when she is still using a cane to walk, to w...
Filmmaker’s Words:
This film came out of a desire to memorialize and explore my deep feelings for my mother, who passed away in 2007. My thoughts were constantly shifting and changing during this process. While sorting through footage that I filmed over a twelve-year period, I saw subtleties that I had previously overlooked,...