Wang Bing adopts his observational documentary style for this rare if not always compelling dramatisation of Mao’s labour camps in the Gobi Desert, as countless starving men faced an unending sense of bleakness, futility and toil.
Review #3,000
Dir. Wang Bing
2010 | China | Drama, History | 112min | 1.85:1 | Mandarin
Not rated – likely to be NC16 for some disturbing scenes
Cast: Cheng Zhengwu, Jing Niansong, Li Xiangnian
Plot: The film focuses on the suffering of Chinese who were imprisoned in a forced labour camp called Jiabiangou in the Gobi Desert in winter 1960 under Mao Zedong on the grounds that they were ‘rightist elements’.
Awards: Nom. for Golden Lion (Venice)
International Sales: Wild Bunch
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Mao’s Labour Camps; Human Suffering
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Slow
Audience Type: Arthouse
Viewed: Screener
Spoilers: No
A rare dramatic reenactment from China’s GOAT documentarian Wang Bing, The Ditch will satiate the curiosity of die-hard aficionados, but for most cinephilic audiences, it may not be particularly resonant unless you already have a deep interest in Chinese history from the Mao Zedong era.
Known for producing documentaries of extreme lengths, The Ditch is thankfully less than two hours, though the minutes do slog by in his usual slow cinema wavelength.
I had to play the film at 1.2x speed to get through it more comfortably (sacrilege, I know, but I’m a practical viewer rather than a purist).
His observational documentary style remains unchanged even in dramatic mode, which is interesting in itself, though Wang does fall back to the conventions of ‘plotting’ once in a while to move the story along, particularly in the sequence where a woman tries to locate her ‘missing’ husband.
“You look forward too much. Try to hold on until tomorrow first.”
Here in The Ditch, we see men toiling laboriously in the extreme cold with hardly any proper food, for days, weeks, months… until they die. The few lucky ones survive to tell the tale, and indeed, it is a harrowing tale that hardly anyone knows about.
We know about Mao’s labour camps for the intellectuals and political agitators, framed or otherwise, but to be sent to the middle of the Gobi Desert for hard labour and reformation was no doubt a death sentence. And so, Wang, finds morbid fascination in unearthing this tragic part of Chinese history.
Yet, despite an unending sense of bleakness and futility, The Ditch somehow finds patches of human warmth here and there from these men as they try to help each other to survive.
The jury is out on whether Wang’s treatment of the topic is really suitable for dramatisation—it remains somewhat unconvincing to me, but the actors are all committed to portraying the torment and trauma despite the ‘weight’ of history feeling rather elusive by its denouement.
Grade: B-
Eternality Tan 