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This moving documentary by Michael Apted tells the story of the Chinese democracy movement that culminated in the massive uprising in Tiananmen Square in May 1989. Li Lu, a leader of the student movement, appears in interview segments to talk about growing up during the cultural revolution, and his reminiscences provide a structure to the story of how a younger generation in China came to cry out for democracy. Archival footage and dramatic reenactments provide a compelling visual component to his story. The protests at Beijing University that mushroomed into the massive protests at Tiananmen Square are shown in well-chosen news footage, and student leaders, including Chai Ling and Wu'er Kaixi, talk about their experiences in the vortex of the uprising. This film pulls no punches in describing how the Chinese government finally sent in thousands of troops and crushed the revolt, and some of the footage shown is disturbing. The student leaders were forced to go underground, and they speak movingly of how they were smuggled out of China in fear for their lives. Their thoughts about China, which they still profess to love, are fascinating, and this is a very intelligent look at one of the most important stories of our time.
--Robert J. McNamara
Michael Apted's documentary about China's democracy movement is lucid, intelligent, and, like every good movie about politics, almost unendurably sad. At its center is the 1989 face-off in Tiananmen Square between idealistic student demonstrators and the hard-line Communist government. The dissenters, who thought they had the old-timers on the run, instead wound up running for their own lives. The story of the demonstrations and the final massacre is told with archival footage inflected, heartbreakingly, by the memories of the movement's leaders-exiles who live with the knowledge that their words and their tactics resulted in the deaths of many of their followers. The movie vividly depicts the emotional cost of battling oppression. You see in these young faces the effects of an exhausting struggle between hope and bottomless regret. In English and Mandarin. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
