Hu Jie (1958-), Chinese documentary filmmaker. Hu Jie was born and raised in a military family in Jinan, Shandong Province. He joined the military in 1977, graduated from the Shanghai Air Force University of Political Studies in 1986, and went to the People's Liberation Army Academy of Art to study oil painting for two years. In 1992, he was discharged from the military, and briefly worked at the Jiangsu Branch of Xinhua News Agency as a film and television editor. In 1995, he made his first documentary Yuanmingyuan Artist Village, which documented the forced dissolution of the village where he lived in 1993.
In Hu Jie's own view, his works can be divided into three categories: 1) contemporary reality that focuses on ordinary people, such as *Remote Mountain* (about coal miners), *The Female Matchmaker* (about marriage in a remote village), and *Mountain Songs in the Plain* (about abducted women); 2) historical documentation aiming to fill in the blanks of the official narratives about the Anti-Rightist campaign, the Cultural Revolution, and the Great Famine, including *Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul*, *Though I am Gone*, and *Spark*; 3) documentation of citizen activism, in collaboration with feminist scholar and activist Ai Xiaoming (see separate entry), including *The Epic of the Central Plains*, *Garden in Heaven*, and *Care and Love*. Hu Jie has no investors and receives no foreign funding, and he pays for his own filming costs. Due to their political sensitivity, most of his works cannot be publicly screened in China, and are only circulated underground or screened outside the country.
In producing his historical documentaries, Hu Jie hunts down survivors, finds rare written material, unearthing witnesses and documents that tell in excruciating detail how the events unfolded. He is also very much present as a narrator and judge in those films, clearly taking sides with the victims of Maoist China. Almost all of his films come across as radically low-tech — largely because he works alone, but also to give the feeling of authenticity and discovery. (Read more at and ).
