Winter in China. A town in the snow. Night is falling. Wrapped in her coat, an old woman walks slowly through a housing complex to her simple apartment. Inside, He Fengming settles into her armchair and remembers. Her memo-ries take us back to 1949, to the beginning of a journey that will take us through 30 years of her life and of the New China. In FENGMING, Wang Bing, whose majestic, nine-hour epic, WEST OF THE TRACKS, screened at Anthol-ogy last year, presents her unforgettable story, from her repeated persecution under the two reformatory campaigns in China during the 1950s through her rehabilitation in 1974.

“Fearlessly delving into buried chapters of China’s communist history and shattering the boundaries we place around personal memory, Wang Bing has created a remarkable cinematic hybrid. At once a devastating portrait of an era, a conceptual art piece, a precious document and a fateful love story, FENGMING is the harrowing account of one woman’s experience in Mao’s labor camps…. With her oral history recorded almost in real time, the intrusion of a camera seems to fade almost entirely, granting the audience an unforgettably raw and immediate emotional experi-ence.” –Giovanna Fulvi, TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

“Unprompted and unrelenting, an elderly Chinese woman recounts her harrowing experiences during the 1950s anti-Rightist campaign and 1960s Cultural Revolution in a torrent of words that is not only a devastating critique of Chi-nese Communism but, in a way, the [Cannes Film Festival’s] most remarkable performance.” –J. Hoberman, VIL-LAGE VOICE