My Mother Wang Peiying
Hu Jie
Release year: 2011
Run time: 68 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
Wang Peiying was a widow with seven children who worked at the Ministry of Railways. In the wake of the Great Leap Forward, she publicly called on Mao Zedong to take responsibility for his mistakes and resign. As a result, she was drugged and incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. Released and paraded round Beijing, she refused to withdraw her accusations, but reiterated them. Her jaw was broken to prevent her speaking. On January 27th 1970, following a mass trial at the Worker’s Stadium, she was executed.
Director biography
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.