BEIJING SPRING Official Movie Trailer 2021

Through never-before-seen footage hidden from the authorities for thirty-five years, Beijing Spring chronicles China’s first democracy movement and forgotten struggle for freedom of expression.

It was 1979 and reform was in the air. Mao Zedong had died a few years earlier, and the nation began to reawaken after 30 years of oppression that had claimed over 50 million lives. As the Bamboo curtain lifted, young, daring voices demanded the right to free speech, heralding in what became known as the Beijing Spring.

Deng Xiaoping, the new “paramount leader," experimented with economic reforms and free speech, and even tolerated the open posting of liberal ideas and avant-garde art in one easily monitored local in central Beijing — the Democracy Wall was the name given to this long brick wall running along Xidan Street, just west of Tiananmen Square.

At the heart of the film are the “Stars”, a group of self-taught artists (including a 21 year-old Ai Weiwei) whose modernist forms and content expressed individualism and exposed the inhumanity of the Cultural Revolution, challenging the official “red, bright and shiny," propaganda art. A year later, after instigating these freedoms, Deng, fearing the activists’ calls for democracy would threaten his grip on power, ordered the government to crack down. He closed the Democracy wall, shutting the door on this brief moment of reform. Among modern China's first Democracy leaders, Wei Jingsheng and Xu Wenli are shown before their arrests and nearly two decades-long imprisonment.

Now, forty years later, Beijing Spring reveals the story of the Democracy Wall, and of those who lived it — the painters, sculptors, poets, photographers and activists who pushed the boundaries of art and social reform — with reams of never-before-seen 16mm footage, hidden from the Chinese authorities for four decades. For the first time ever, we see the police forcefully remove the Stars artwork from an ad hoc exhibit hung on a fence outside Beijing’s National Gallery. A few days later, on National Day, the Stars and the Democracy Wall activists organized a protest demonstration — the first since the Communists seized power. Thousands came to march through the streets of Beijing, risking their own freedom.

One courageous filmmaker, Chi Xiaoning, stood atop Democracy Wall, camera in hand, recording it all in plain sight of the police. They eventually surrounded Chi and demanded he expose the film. Chi pulled out the unused portions of film, tricking the police into believing he exposed all the negatives. Fearing for the safety of his friends, Chi hid the 47 minutes of salvaged footage in a confidante’s home, swearing him to secrecy. After Chi’s untimely death, no one knew the whereabouts of the footage as it had been kept underground, passed from friend to friend as time passed. After years of searching, the film’s director, Andy Cohen, was able to track down Chi’s film, now shown for the first time ever in Beijing Spring.

These brave voices of Beijing Spring opened a unique window onto a pivotal, and officially censored moment in Chinese history that resonates not only for today’s democracy movement in Hong Kong, but also for all young artists and activists who have the courage to fight any system in any country that tries to suppress the voices of its generation from speaking out against injustice and persecution.