Dao Lu

Initially intending to film veterans of the traumatic Nanking Massacre during the Sino-Japanese war, Xu Xin changed track to focus exclusively on one of the veterans. Eighty-three-year-old Zheng Yan gives the film a placidity that contradicts the violence he has lived through. Apart from a handful of archives that puncture rather than illustrate his story and a few appeased shots of the town where he lives, the camera concentrates on recording his words – a first-person narrative embracing Chinese history over three-quarters of a century. Much like Fengming in Wang Bing’d eponymous film (2007), Zheng Yan’s lucidity failed to prevent either his duplicity or the attacks of the regime he served. Having served as CCP spy during the Japanese occupation, he offers incidentally a first hand account of the propaganda machine, describing how he re-enacted the storming of the presidential palace in 1945 for a newsreel. The strength of Dao lu (Pathway) in fact lies in its ability to show how the deep crack running through his life coincides with the fault-line crossing an entire country. How can we not see in his arrest in 1949 or in his wife’s deportation a textbook example of the absurd endlessness of all purges?