Educational Media Reviews Online

Tiananmen Square's physical vastness beggars the imagination - it can hold a million and a half people without crowding - and it's even vaster in its historical, symbolic dimension. It's where in 1949 Mao Tse-Tung announced the founding of the People's Republic of China. It's where Mao's body lay in a glassed-in coffin for many years following his death for an endless line of viewers to see. And it's where soldiers of the People's Republic fired point blank at the people in the infamous massacre of 1989. One may well ask, Can Tiananmen, in all its multidimensional resonating vastness, be contained in a twenty-nine minute short? Shui-Bo Wang's profoundly moving documentary film artfully answers the question.

Composed entirely of still images and animation, Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square tells Wang's personal story through a plain-spoken, touching narration by Wang himself, over a visual collage of archival and personal photographs, the artist-filmmaker's own exquisite drawings and paintings, and propaganda posters of Mao in all his apotheosizing glory. Wang was born in 1960 into a family whose Communist roots went back through his grandfather to the founding of the Party. His life coincided with many of the major events of the People's Republic, and in telling his story he also tells, of necessity although briefly, the story of the country, which includes, among other events, the famine of 1972 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-69. Wang's own story includes his eventual disillusionment with the failure of the Party to reduce poverty and hardship in the countryside. His film, though, is not colored by an apostate's bitterness. This beautiful, honest, eulogistic tribute is rather tinged with sadness - a sadness that the viewer will also surely feel - for a good cause gone bad.