Defiance-The Reader
-The Hiding Place
-Sophie’s Choice
-Music Box
-Europa, Europa
-Schindler’s List
-Devil’s Arithmetic
-Jakob, the Liar
-The Pianist
-Enemies, a Love Story
-Triumph of the Spirit
-Judgment at Nuremberg
-Everything is Illuminated
-Adam Resurrected
-The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
As part of my students’ education, we have been studying World War II and the Holocaust. If I wanted to show a movie clip depicting the Holocaust, I would certainly have no shortage of English-language movies to pick from. The Anne Frank story alone has been turned into a movie no less than five times.
Likewise, I consider our time in Asia to be part of my daughters on-going education. Our time here has been filled with travel, books, and lots of dinner-table discussions about China past and present. China has been home to some of the Twentieth Century’s most seminal events such as the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square.
The books and discussions have been great, but what I would really like to do is show my daughters some English-language movies that dramatize these key moments in Chinese history. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a period every bit as horrific and devastating as the German Holocaust -20 million dead in one year. The Cultural Revolution was a time of acute political oppression and fear. Neighbor turned against neighbor; children against parents; teacher against student. Individuals were forced to decide whether or not to betray the ones they loved in the name of self-preservation. It was a cruel era filled with the most regretful acts of human despicability. But it was also a time filled with individual acts of defiance, courage, and self-sacrifice. The era had political turmoil, human drama, and personal conflict.
Ditto for Tiananmen Square: revolution, man-versus-the-state, courage, resistance, violence, hope, tragedy.
In other words, these events have all of the ingredients necessary for a successful Hollywood Oscar winner. But, when I look for these English-language movies about the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square, I walk away empty-handed. They are nowhere to be found because they don’t exist. Hollywood hasn’t made them.
Okay, that’s not completely true. They made “The Last Emperor” half of which is about the communist purges. A decade of political chaos, tens of millions dead, and we get half a movie.
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