Morning Sun, A Documentary Film
The film Morning Sun attempts in the space
of a two-hour documentary film to create an inner history of the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution (c.1964-1976). It provides a multi-perspective
view of a tumultuous period as seen through the eyes—and reflected
in the hearts and minds—of members of the high-school generation
that was born around the time of the founding of the People’s Republic
of China in 1949, and that came of age in the 1960s. Others join them
in creating in the film’s conversation about the period and the
psycho-emotional topography of high-Maoist China, as well as the enduring
legacy of that period.
Morning Sun is not a comprehensive or chronological history of
the Cultural Revolution as such; nor is it a study of elite politics or
of student factionalism. The film essays rather a psychological history.
It attempts a cinematic account of experiences and emotions as reflected
on by historical actors who themselves were enacting a history that they
had learned and wished to recreate in their own lives. It is also a film
about the cultures and convictions, as well as the historical events,
that created the impetus, language, style and content of the period—the
films and plays, the music and ideas, the rhetoric and ideologies, the
education and the aspirations, the frustrations and fantasies, as well
as the realities and ardor, that a new revolution that attempted to remake
revolution itself entailed.
Major funding for Morning
Sun was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, with additional funds from ITVS/Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the George D. Smith Fund, the Center for Asian American Media (formerly NAATA), and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.
Morning Sun is a presentation of the Independent
Television Service (ITVS) and the Center for Asian American Media (formerly NAATA), with the participation of ARTE and
the BBC.
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