Mr. Zhang Believes

Mr. Zhang Believes 癡 (Chi) 

Dir. Qiu Jiongjiong. 2015, 135 mins. In Chinese with English subtitles. Qiu’s brilliant fiction-documentary hybrid is based on the life of Zhang Xianchi, a so-called “rightist” persecuted for his unorthodox beliefs. Born into a Nationalist Kuomintang family in the 1930s, Zhang became a progressive young leftist and Communist Party supporter, after betraying his Nationalist father. He then joined the Communist Youth League and attended military college. Two years later, stigmatized by his family background, he lost his job and turned to journalism. In 1958, he was sentenced to five years’ re-education through labor. Qiu turns this story into something extraordinary: a mixture of first-person testimony, filmed theater, historical fantasy, and social realist drama, interspersed with vivid surreal tableaux. 

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