Songs from Maidichong
Hu Jie
Release year: 2014
Run time: 82 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
A group of Miao minority Christians live in Maidichong, a small village in a remote mountain area in Yunnan Province. Christianity was brought to them by an English missionary called Samuel Pollard in 1903. Pollard created the Miao script for these villagers and translated the Bible into their language.
For years, singing hymns and the gospels have brought joy to these Miao, and carried them though hard time, including the Cultural Revolution. At that time, they were forced to renounce their faith for Communism. Memories of this period remain strong among the villagers, but today, the holy songs once again reverberate through Maidichong, as the villagers’ belief in divine grace never truly disappeared.
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.