Wu wenguang biography sample

A documentary filmmaker speaks with Jonathan Chatwin

Ed: This is the latest and last (for now) in Jonathan Chatwin’s China Conversations interviews.

Free biography sample

Read the archive here.

Wu Wenguang is an independent filmmaker, known internationally as one of the founders of the Chinese documentary movement. Born in Yunnan in 1956, his breakthrough film was Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers, which offered an intimate portrait of a group of struggling artists in late 1980s Beijing.

His other films include 1966: My Time in the Red Guards (1993) and Jiang Hu: On the Road(1999). In 2010, Wu founded the Memory Project to encourage the preservation of personal stories of China’s history; since then, hundreds of film makers have returned to their towns and villages as part of the project to interview elders who lived through the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and other traumatic events from the country’s recent past. 

When did you decide that you wanted to be a docume