The Guy Who Arrived in Heaven
Hu Jie
Release year: 2012
Run time: 37 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
This film tells the story of the translator Wang Tiesheng. Before 1949, Wang graduated from Tongji University in Shanghai. He was a student with good morals, intelligence and health. He then served as an assistant professor in the Economics Department of Renmin University. However, he was labelled a “Rightist” in 1957 and was sent to a farm in Tianjin to undertake forced labour. There, he underwent extreme humiliating “reform” and suffered starvation. Later, on a bumpy road as he was being sent to be buried, he miraculously discovered that he was actually alive.
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.