East Bay Premiere!

“Yan-Ting Yuen revisits (China's) recent past to explore the history and legacy of one of the strangest byproducts of totalitarian madness: the revolutionary spectacular. With the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the government allowed only about a dozen revolutionary operas, or Yang Ban Xi, to be performed on stage and on screen; the most popular became known as the eight model works. . . . While Yuen doesn't shy away from the barbarism of the Cultural Revolution, and regularly reminds us of its human cost, she evinces none of the tendentiousness that can turn history into a droning lesson. Instead, using a nice mixture of archival material . . . and interviews with both former performers and one-time consumers, Ms. Yuen suggestively argues that the past isn't exactly past in China, at least when it comes to its cultural production” (Manohla Dargis, New York Times).