Investigating My Father and “Reading Hunger” with The Memory Project

Investigating My Father and “Reading Hunger” with The Memory Project

Wu Wenguang (Director, Investigating My Father)
Zhang Ping, Liu Xiaolei, Zhang Mengai (Members of The Memory Priject)
Moderator:  Michael Berry (East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, UCLA)
Saturday November 19, 2016 / 2:00pm-5:15pm
The Pollock Theater

This event is free but space is limited; please reserve a ticket here.

Pioneering documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang presents Investigating My Father (2016), a film twenty years in the making that explores his father’s story of transformation from landowner’s son and man of the ‘old society’ to the post-1949 ‘new society,’ a history he spoke about with his son for the first time for this film. Following the screening of Investigating My Father, Wu Wenguang and fellow members of the filmmaking collective The Memory Project Zhang Ping, Liu Xiaolei, and Zhang Mengai will present “Reading Hunger,” an account of the process by which each filmmaker returned to their own village to interview elders and document their memories of the Great Famine. A discussion and Q&A with the filmmakers will be led by Michael Berry, Professor of East Asian Languages and Culture at UCLA.

In 2010, Wenguang founded The Memory Project to support amateur filmmakers working in rural China to collect oral histories from the survivors of the Great Famine (1958–1961). Over the past six years, the filmmaking collective and their body of work have grown to include over a thousand interviews about the Great Famine, as well as the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960), the Land Reform and Collectivization period (1949–1953), the Four Cleanups Movement (1964), and the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).

Sponsored by the Carsey Wolf Center and the IHC’s Community Matters series.