VENICE, Sept 6, (RTRS): A powerful Chinese film on the plight of political prisoners condemned to forced labor camps in the late 1950s wooed critics in Venice on Monday, with some tipping it as a strong contender for the festival’s top prize.
“The Ditch” tells the little-known story of some 3,000 people deported for “re-education” to labor camps on the edge of the Gobi desert, in western China, and struggling to survive extreme climate and acute food shortages.
Billed as right-wing enemies by the government for even mildly criticizing the Communist party or simply because of their background, many died of starvation, disease and exhaustion in the ditches that served as dormitories.

Director Wang Bing spent three years tracking down survivors and wardens of the Jiabiangou and Mingshui Camps for the film, a surprise entry in the main competition line-up that was only revealed on Monday.
“For 10, maybe 20 years, independent Chinese cinema has focused above all else on the social problems of the poorest working classes in contemporary China,” Bing says in the production notes.
“The Ditch is perhaps the first film to deal directly with contemporary China’s political past, talking as it does about the ‘Rightists’ and what they endured in the re-education camps. It’s still a taboo subject.”
The film, warmly applauded at a press screening, is unlikely to be released in its home country, where authorities remain sensitive about how such topics are portrayed.
Still, Bing said he hoped the film would be an opportunity for younger Chinese like him — he was born in 1967 — to learn about their country’s past.

History
“I wanted to talk about our history, past events that can be criticized because of the way in which the Chinese suffered, and show them so that people can reflect on them,” he told reporters, speaking through a translator.
Shot like a documentary, The Ditch focuses on the last three months of life in an annex camp where the 1,500 prisoners who had survived until then were moved in 1960, as drought ravaged the whole of China.
Initially forced to plow 4,000 hectares of barren land in the middle of nowhere, they are later left to waste in underground dormitories as food runs out and many cannot stand on their feet.
Barely 500 people came out of that experience alive when authorities finally decided to send the prisoners back home.
“Everything in the film really happened at the camp. Nothing has been made up or added,” says Bing, who used many non-professional actors for his first feature film after a string of documentaries.
“The Ditch” is one of 24 titles vying for the Venice film festival’s top Golden Lion prize which will be awarded on Saturday.
“It’s a film that brings dignity” to those who suffered and not a “denunciation film or a protest film,” said the documentarist of his first fiction film.
“We wanted to preserve the memories, be aware of the memories, even painful ones,” he told a news conference.

As Wang was born in 1967, the events “took place before my birth, so I put in great effort to understand the 1950s and 1960s in China, to understand the historical truth,” he said.
Li Xiangnian, herself fresh out of acting school, said she discarded the techniques she had learned to embrace new ones under Wang’s direction for her role as a woman who comes to the camp to visit her husband, who had died a week earlier.
“I developed an understanding of interior love, something that never changes no matter the era, the powerful sorrow of a strong woman,” she said.
The limits of human endurance are also tested in Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s “Essential Killing,” a late entry in the line-up for the 67th Mostra.
In it, Vincent Gallo plays an American Taleban named Mohammed who is picked up in Afghanistan and “rendered” to Poland, where he escapes into snowbound mountains and kills to survive.
Like Wang, Skolimowski said his film was not political. “I’m trying to use as little as possible of the whole political context,” said the veteran director, playwright and actor.

Mohammed’s capture in Afghanistan and subsequent escape is “background, as a frame for this story,” Skolimowski said. “Of course it’s a fantasy, because if something like that would really happen, either we wouldn’t know anything about it because it would be top secret or it would be a big scandal.”
On the run in the snow, Gallo also eats bark and hallucinogenic berries — and even drinks a mother’s milk at gunpoint — to survive.
“The fact that Vincent Gallo has such strange features and is an animalistic character, makes the protagonist of this film so ambiguous,” Skolimowski said.
“It is an animal on the run and as such we tend to keep to the side of the underdog,” he added.
The two films are among 24 competing for the coveted Golden Lion at this year’s festival, to be awarded on Saturday, with Gallo also present as the director of “Promises Written in Water” about a girl with a terminal illness.

Making waves on the lagoon but out of competition is Casey Affleck’s “I’m Still Here,” a documentary on Joaquin Phoenix’s transition from actor to wannabe rapper.
Affleck said Phoenix “never shied away from letting me see all the different aspects of his personality.”
“I owed it to him and to myself to do it as well as I could and to make it as unflinching a look at him as I possibly could,” said the Oscar-nominated director of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.”
“This obviously was never really for me about celebrity or about fame,” he said. “It’s also about friendship, ambition, dreams, the artist in general.”