When the ravages of Alzheimer’s leave an elderly woman marooned in painful memories of October 1950, her grandchild comes up with a creative strategy.
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They scaled the hardest heights
KEITH BENNETT recommends 1921, an outstanding film on those who struggled to bring the Chinese Communist Party into being and in doing so laid the foundations for the country’s current pre-eminence
'STORMING HEAVEN': 1921
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1921 (15)
Directed by Huang Jianxin and Zheng Dasheng
THE 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been the occasion for many impressive events globally throughout July, and 1921, which has had a limited general release in Britain and Ireland, is a feature film worthy of the centenary.
While its focus is that momentous year, it deploys flashbacks at the beginning reaching as far back as the 1850s, showing China’s degradation to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal ruined nation and then, at its conclusion, a potted but vivid historical reconstruction of subsequent years.
This culminates in Chairman Mao proclaiming the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1 1949, as well as Young Pioneers visiting the restored site of the first party congress 100 years later.
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