On May 16, 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (无产阶级文化大革命) in mainland China. Under Mao’s direct command, high school and university students formed Red Guard groups (红卫兵), rebelled and seized power from local communist party and government institutions. In August of that year, the Red Guards took to the streets to destroy the Four Olds (破四旧). Following that, the red violence escalated rapidly. According to official statistics, 1,774 people were beaten to death in Beijing alone within one month. The killing wave that took place that August would later be remembered as Red August (红八月).
On August 5, 1966, Bian Zhongyun (卞仲耘), vice principal of the Girls’ middle School affiliated with Beijing Normal University (北师大女附中), was beaten to death by Red Guards, becoming the first person killed during Red August. Just days later, on August 18, Mao Zedong famously received Red Guard leader Song Binbin (宋彬彬) at Tiananmen Square, a symbolic moment that further inflamed the movement’s violence.
According to a 2014 Southern Weekly report (南方周末), Bian Zhongyun’s husband, Wang Jingyao (王晶垚), documented his wife’s death using a camera—capturing rare images of her body as well as photos of Red Guard slogans and big-character posters (大字报) posted on their home. These photographs remain among the very few firsthand records of that time.
In the documentary Though I Am Gone, Hu Jie uses Wang’s photographs as the central thread, and interviews surviving eyewitnesses to reconstruct the final moments of Bian Zhongyun’s life and the historical context.
The film won the Best Feature Documentary at the 2008 Chinese Documentary Festival in Hong Kong and was screened at the 2012 Melbourne International Film Festival.
The title of the documentary is taken from a poem written by Boris Pasternak, in the epilogue of his novel Doctor Zhivago:
Though I am gone,
I shall return on the third day.
As rafts floating down a river,
As a convoy of barges, the centuries
Will float to me for judgment,
Out of the dark.
Free admission. Please register via Eventbrite. Registration link is here.
Screening Information
- Date: June 21, 2025
- Time: 15:00–17:00
- Location:
- Blaues Haus Bibliothek
- 7, 30169 Hannover
Film Information
- Title: Though I Am Gone
- Director: Hu Jie
- Year: 2006
- Runtime: 68 minutes
- Language: Mandarin Chinese (with English subtitles)
- Country: China
- Genre: Documentary
About the Director
- Hu Jie, born in 1958, is one of China’s most prominent independent documentary filmmakers. He is known for his courageous efforts to excavate and record the buried histories of modern China. His major works include Though I Am Gone, Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, and Spark.