The Ditch

The Ditch (2011)

夹边沟

The film focuses on the suffering of Chinese who were imprisoned in a forced labor camp called Jiabiangou in the Gobi Desert in winter 1960 under Mao Zedong on the grounds that they were "rightist elements". The film tells of the harsh life of these men, who coped with physical exhaustion, extreme cold, starvation and death on a daily basis.

Date of release
2011-04-15
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (27)
Runtime
1h 52m
Genres
Drama
Director
Wang Bing

Casting

Interesting facts

The Ditch is a 2010 docudrama film produced, written and directed by Wang Bing, based on the novel Goodbye, Jiabiangou by Yang Xianhui. A reenactment of the forced labor camps called Jiabiangou during 1960's Maoist China, it focuses on the suffering of those imprisoned in the Gobi Desert after the Anti-Rightist Campaign, following the prisoners harsh life, who coped with physical exhaustion, extreme cold, starvation and death on a daily basis. It is one of the first films to tackle the subject.

Production

The film, based on Goodbye, Jiabiangou (English version translated as Woman from Shanghai: Tales of Survival from a Chinese Labor Camp), a book by Yang Xianhui about the life and toil of inmates sent to the Jiabiangou internment camp in the 1950s and 1960s, is one of the first films to deal directly with subject, which remains a political taboo. The director also interviewed camp survivors of Jiabiangou and of the Mingshui camp.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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