They called it the Cultural Revolution -- which was an awfully elegant name for an era of fear, repression and attempted thought control, all in the name of class struggle. But such was the hubris of Red China's Chairman Mao Tse-tung, who presided over that revolution for the final ten years of his life (1966-1976). Those years are vividly recalled in this illuminating documentary, which looks at a period of sweeping change, with special attention to the casualties: the ostracized "bourgeois" families, the publicly beaten teachers, the exiles banished to remote provinces, the victims of mass execution. As we see, there are all sorts of ways to purge your society of its innocent pariahs.

The filmmakers (who also gave us the Tiananmen Square documentary The Gate of Heavenly Peace) have done an admirably thorough job of rounding up the period's key survivors, from high party officials who suddenly found themselves out of favor to founding members of the radical student-activist Red Guard group. Accompanied by rare, fascinating footage from newsreels, propaganda films and old documentaries, these talking heads tell a story of ideals that hardened into unbending ideologies, passions that mutated into violent urges, and loyalties that ran zealously rampant. Most of all, this film, expertly knit together by documentarians who are not just learned historians but also born storytellers, re-created the irresistible momentum of a movement that became a true revolution of awesome, often terrible scope.

Michael Sauter, Time Out New York, Oct. 23-30, 2003