The Road

The Road (documentary)
(Zanbo Zhang, 2015, 95 min, China/Denmark, in Chinese w/ English subtitles, Color, Digital)

Introduced by Prof. Guo-Juin Hong (AMES)

For three decades the world has witnessed China’s fast economic development. In 2008 the Chinese government issued a 586 billion US dollars plan as an attempt to minimize the impact of the global financial crisis on the world’s second largest economy. The plan was to invest in infrastructure and social welfare throughout China. The plan has been called the Second Great Leap Forward referring to Chairman Mao’s disastrous plan in the 40’s that cost millions of lives. It was an absurd period where all citizens were mobilized to refine metal. The Chinese director Zhang Zambo managed in 2010 to get unique and unprecedented access to the implementation of the financial plan. For three years the director filmed the making of a section of a highway through a quiet village in Hunan, a province in central China. This is the province where Chairman Mao was born. The result is a rare insight to the impact the financial plan has had on a local community.