In 1949, the revolution of Mao Zedong infused revolutionaries worldwide with hope. In France, existentialists Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre singled China out as a nation with the potential to set all other nations free. Then in 1956, Chairman Mao made a public declaration to encourage free speech and debate among China's intellectuals. A few months later, Mao's police force moved in on tens of thousands of outspoken thinkers.
Taken from their homes and workplaces, these men were sent en masse to the Gobi Desert and forced into ditch-digging. The dirt-clotted trenches stretched far and long into the horizon, like giant snakes that emitted a poisonous gas of disease and despair. Men who died or collapsed were thrown into carts and burned, then their remains were kicked into — you guessed it: ditches. Those who made it through the endless months of hard labor and pale, muddy bowls of vile soup (their only ration) prayed for death or insanity.
This forms the story line of "The Ditch," directed by Hong Kong's Wang Bing ("West of the Tracks") and probably the most depressing film to be released this year.