Though I Am Gone
Hu Jie
Release year: 2007
Run time: 70 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
On August 5th 1966, Bian Zhongyu, a Communist Party member and vice-principal of a Beijing secondary school, was tortured to death. She is believed to be the first teacher killed by her students during the “Red August” of 1966, as the Cultural Revolution took off in China. This film explores this event and how Bian’s family and colleagues experienced it.
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.