All Under Heaven
Also known as Long Bow: A Village in Transition, this is the second in a series of hour-long documentaries on life in the rural Chinese village of Long Bow made under unprecedented circumstances--without interpreters or restrictions--by Carma Hinton, a Beijing-born American who was educated in China and at Harvard University, and has traveled and worked throughout the Chinese countryside; and Richard Gordon, a cinematographer and photographic journalist who has also worked in several Chinese villages and factories. On viewing All Under Heaven at the recent Margaret Mead Film Festival ‘85, Village Voice critic J. Hoberman wrote, “More distanced than its predecessor (Small Happiness), All Under Heaven...is a compressed social history of Long Bow over the past few decades. Village elders recount tales of famine...and exploitation before explicating various shifts in the political line--from the land reforms of 1949...(to) the current Four Modernizations.... Replete with village rituals...All Under Heaven gives you an appreciation for the successive waves of Chinese history--not to mention the Kafkaesque traditions of its bureaucracy....”