"You young people are like the morning sun. You are our hope for the future."
-- Mao Zedong

The Cultural Revolution has to be one of the strangest periods of any totalitarian regime. From the mid-1960s through the mid-'70s, Mao encouraged a sort of controlled open rebellion that purged former Nationalists and many of the original members of the Communist Party.

After the period of the Great Leap Forward, which was a colossal failure and led to starvation in rural China, Mao sensed that his power could be challenged from within his party and took drastic steps to purge those individuals and their philosophies.

What followed was a series of revolts, taking root on college campuses, that encouraged the denunciation, humiliation and sometimes beating and killing of individuals who had flourished in the Nationalist and early Communist regimes -- professors and doctors, for example.

Bravo for "Morning Sun," a densely packed documentary that is about as comprehensive a look at the Cultural Revolution as can be imagined in a two-hour work. Funded by National Asian American Telecommunications Association, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, and directed by three North Americans with extensive experience living in China, it is a well-researched smorgasbord of newsreel and documentary footage spliced with current interviews with those on the front lines.

Among the high points

-- The excellent use of the early '60s propaganda film "The East Is Red, " which influenced a generation of young idealists, and several other influential films. As the Cultural Revolution began, the heroes of these films became less and less complex until they were simple-minded, pure characters whose sole objective was "to be a revolutionary bolt that never rusts." As one former revolutionary says, "I didn't want to be a bolt. Who wants to be a bolt?"

-- Rare interviews with key individuals, like the widow and daughter of former Mao confidant Liu Shaoqi, who was denounced and banished to a remote corner of China; Red Guard leader Luo Xiaohai; Li Rui, who also was exiled; and his daughter, Li Nanyang, who was estranged from her father until she had the courage and the wisdom to call him "Dad" -- many years later.

-- Mao thought that "only out of great disorder comes great order," but one witness observes, "There were no rights -- only the right to make revolution."

Certainly, "Morning Sun" cannot tell the entire complex and controversial story of that era. What it makes clear, however, is that China detonated a "spiritual atom bomb," as one Party member put it, and the fallout from that devastation will be felt for a very long time.

G. Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle, April 2, 2004