Care and Love
Ai Xiaoming and Hu Jie
Release year: 2007
Run time: 108 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
Liu Xianhong, a Hebei peasant, contracted HIV from a routine hospital blood transfusion. This documentary is the story of her arduous but successful litigation against the hospital responsible. The film documents the fates of several families infected with HIV in the same manner, and reveals rural China’s awakening social consciousness against the backdrop of the camaraderie, support, and love that the victims find in each other.
Director biography
Hu Jie
Hu Jie is an independent historian, artist, and filmmaker. Born in Jinan, Shandong in 1958, he graduated from the Art College of the People’s Liberation Army. He works in oils and woodcuts from his lakeside studio in Nanjing. His films are among the most important documents of China’s unacknowledged “unoffcial history”, and include Looking for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2005), about a martyr-poet critic of Mao; and Though I Am Gone (2007), about an elite Beijing girls’ high school whose students murdered their headmaster at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.