The Minjian jiyi yingxiang jihua or Folk/Minjian Memory Project of Caochangdi (CCD) Workstation in Beijing, led by Wu Wenguang and Wen Hui, provides a multi-media effort springing from interviews by a team of young people in the countryside about the Great Leap Forward Famine of the late 1950s. The project combines feature documentaries with the archiving of oral history video, and embeds the resulting digital work in theatrical performances. This essay concentrates upon several of its early documentaries that combine the aesthetics of “making-of” films with a “filial quest,” a search for historical news to expand the self in history, in a human time that is counted in generations. Amid ongoing and constantly remade filial obligation and attachments of love and anger, these documentary makers and the people they film wrestle with this fact: while memories are objectifications of the past, remembering is an act in the present.

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2015
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