The directors of THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE, Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, have made thirteen films about China, including MORNING SUN and the acclaimed trilogy ONE VILLAGE IN CHINA, which was broadcast nationally in the U.S. and abroad (including the BBC, France's Canal Plus and Germany's ARD). The series received more than twenty awards at international film festivals, including a George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award.
--Director, Producer, and Interviewer Carma Hinton was born in China to American parents and was raised and educated there until 1971; Chinese is her first language and culture. She is a scholar as well as a filmmaker. She received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976, and a Ph.D. in art history from Harvard University. She is a Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Visual Culture and Chinese Studies at George Mason University, and has also taught courses in Chinese language, history, and culture at Swarthmore, Middlebury, Wellesley and Northeastern. For her work in film, she was awarded a Rockefeller Intercultural Film/Video Fellowship in 1988.
--Director, Producer, and Cameraman Richard Gordon has been involved with numerous projects in China as director of photography or producer. His credits include work for National Geographic, the National Film Board of Canada, NOVA , the independent feature documentary DISTANT HARMONY: PAVAROTTI IN CHINA, and the PBS series CHINA IN REVOLUTION. For his previous work, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 and a Rockefeller Intercultural Film/Video Fellowship in 1988.
FILMOGRAPHYCREATIVE EXCHANGES: SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE SILK ROAD (2004), a twenty-minute film about the Silk Road Project, an international ensemble of musicians founded by Yo-Yo Ma.
MORNING SUN (2003), a two-hour film about China's Cultural Revolution (c. 1964-1976).
THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE (1995), a documentary exploring the 1989 protest movement in the context of the political habits and attitudes that have come to inform public life in China over the past century. THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE has received several awards, including a George Foster Peabody Award, and both the International Critics Prize and Best Social and Political Documentary at the Banff Television Festival.
ABODE OF ILLUSION (1992), an hour-long film about Chang Dai-chien, a famous modern Chinese painter who is arguably the greatest forger of all time.
ONE VILLAGE IN CHINA (1987), a three-part series examining life in Long Bow, a rural community 400 miles southwest of Beijing (broadcast on PBS, BBC, Arts & Entertainment Cable and throughout Europe and Asia). ONE VILLAGE IN CHINA includes:
1. SMALL HAPPINESS , which explores sexual politics in rural China with segments on love and marriage, foot-binding, child-bearing and birth control. Completed in 1984.
2. TO TASTE A HUNDRED HERBS , which explores themes of religion and medicine by examining the life of Dr. Shen, a Catholic village doctor. Completed in 1986.
3. ALL UNDER HEAVEN , which chronicles the history of Long Bow over several decades - from the Revolution in 1949 and collectivization in the 1950's through the recent shift to private farming. Completed in 1985.
FIRST MOON (1987), a thirty-minute documentary about lunar New Year celebrations in the Chinese countryside.
STILT DANCERS (1981), a thirty-minute film about stilt dancing.YIN YU TANG: A CHINESE HOME (2003), a seventeen-minute film about a house that was moved from a Chinese village and re-assembled for the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
GUONIAN (2003), a sixteen-minute film about rural New Year's festivities and rituals in southern China.
GUOMEN (2003), a sixteen-minute film about wedding preparations and rituals in a southern Chinese village.
KEY PERSONNEL
(listed in alphabetical order)
-- Deborah Amos , Narrator of the 35mm film print version of THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE, is now a senior correspondent at ABC News. Prior to joining ABC News, Ms. Amos spent sixteen years with National Public Radio, where she was most recently the London Bureau Chief. Previously she was based in Amman, Jordan, as an NPR foreign correspondent. Ms. Amos won several awards, including a Columbia DuPont Award and Breakthru Award, and widespread recognition for her coverage of the Gulf War in 1991. For her journalistic work, including her coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen protest movement for NPR, she was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University from 1991-92. She is also the author of Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World (Simon & Schuster, 1992).
-- Geremie R. Barmé , Writer and Associate Director, is a Fellow at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra. Trained in Australia in Chinese and Buddhist Studies, he went to university in China from 1974-77. Thereafter he lived in China, Hong Kong and Japan for extended periods. Under his Chinese name, Bai Jieming, he has written widely for the Hong Kong and Taiwan press and has published two volumes of criticism in Chinese. Although his doctoral dissertation was in Chinese literary and art history, which he did under the supervision of Pierre Ryckmans (Simon Leys), he presently works on Chinese cultural and intellectual history. From 1989, he headed the Australian National University's "Tiananmen Documentary Project." He has edited two anthologies of Chinese dissident writing ( Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience with John Minford, New York: Hill & Wang, 1988; and New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices , with Linda Jaivin, New York: Times Books, 1992). His latest books are Shades of Mao: the Posthumous Career of Chairman Mao (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995) and In the Red: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, forthcoming). He is a prominent media commentator on China in Australia.
-- David Carnochan , Editor and Associate Director, has been a core member of the Long Bow Group since its inception. He has edited all previous Hinton/Gordon films including the Peabody Award winning SMALL HAPPINESS. In addition, he served as Associate Producer on TO TASTE A HUNDRED HERBS and ALL UNDER HEAVEN, and Associate Director on FIRST MOON and ABODE OF ILLUSION. He has also edited numerous other film and video documentaries including the award-winning SATURDAY NIGHT/SUNDAY MORNING: THE TRAVELS OF GATEMOUTH MOORE, FOUR FROM THE NEW YORKER for Oscar-winner Aviva Slesin, and DATELINE 1956: BUDAPEST for the "Eagle and Bear" television series. His own award-winning film, MEMAW, was screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
-- John Crowley , Writer, has been writing scripts and narration for documentaries for twenty five years, and is particularly known for his work in archival documentaries: THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, about the 1939 World's Fair in New York; PEARL HARBOR: SURPRISE AND REMEMBRANCE, the 50th anniversary program for PBS; and many others. Two documentaries he has worked on have been selected for previous New York Film Festivals (THE SECRET AGENT, AMERICA AND LEWIS HINE). Two others have received Academy Award nominations. Crowley is also a novelist, a recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and is currently at work on the third volume of a four-volume novel, Aegypt .
-- Carmen Flowers , Narrator of the Frontline version of THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE, has hosted or anchored a number of television programs for HBO, CINEMAX, SHOWTIME, THE DISNEY CHANNEL, and THE TRAVEL CHANNEL. She was the spokesperson for the SONY Corporation of America, and has also appeared in the feature films "Bootsy and Paynie" (TURNER PICTURES) and "The Tragedy of Flight 107" (HBO Pictures). She is currently a field reporter for "The Home Health Report," and is the co-owner of one of New York's premier commercial audio recording facilities, Liebert Recording Studios, Inc.
-- Gail Hershatter , Associate Director, is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the author of The Workers of Tianjin and co-author of Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s . Her new book, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai , will be published in 1996.
--Producer Peter Kovler co-produced HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE, which won the International Critics Prize at Cannes in 1988 and an Academy Award in 1989. He was the Executive Producer of a 1983 PBS documentary THE FIRST 50 YEARS: REFLECTIONS ON U.S.-SOVIET RELATIONS, which won a Columbia DuPont Award in 1984.
-- Mark Pevsner , Composer, is based in Boston, where he composes, performs as a pianist, and teaches. He received a Ph.D. in composition from Harvard University, where he studied with Leon Kirchner and Ivan Tcherepnin. His chamber compositions include Septet for Horn, Piano, and Strings, Trio for Violin, Viola, and Piano, and Elegy; and his previous film scores include the music for The Silence of the Roaches, an exploration of Massachusetts landlord-tenant law. He has taught at Harvard University, and he has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and from Meet the Composer. His essay about the original music composed for THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE discusses his use of the Chinese song, "The East is Red."
--Producer Orville Schell observed the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen and is among the foremost authors on contemporary China. He is a long time contributor to The New Yorker, as well such magazines and periodicals as The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Newsweek, The China Quarterly, Vanity Fair, and The New York Review of Books. The winner of several writing fellowships (including ones from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation) and numerous awards (including the Overseas Press Club of America's award for the best article on a foreign subject and the Page One Award for the best investigative story), Mr. Schell has also written fourteen books, nine of them about China. His most recent book is Mandate of Heaven , published by Simon & Schuster. Schell has been a television commentator for ABC-TV, NBC-TV, and CBS-TV as well as working as a consultant on a number of films, including a PBS's Frontline documentary on Tibet and an Emmy award winning program for 60 Minutes . He serves on the board of the Yale-China Association and Human Rights Watch, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Schell is currently a Senior Fellow at the Freedom Forum at Columbia University and a Research Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
-- Jeffrey Wasserstrom , Consultant, is Associate Professor of History at Indiana University. He is a specialist in the study of Chinese student movements and the symbolism of the Chinese revolution, and the author of Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China , and coeditor of Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China.
--Producer Lise Yasui is a documentary filmmaker whose film, FAMILY GATHERING, aired nationally on PBS's The American Experience , and on the BBC, and was nominated for an Academy Award. Yasui has served on editorial boards, as a consultant, and as a panelist for numerous media organizations including PBS's P.O.V. series, the National Asian American Telecommunications Association, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and National Geographic.
Advisors to THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE include Merle Goldman, Boston University; Harry Harding, The Brookings Institution; Leo Ou-fan Lee, Harvard University; Andrew Nathan, Columbia University; Barry Naughton, University of California, San Diego; William Parish, University of Chicago; Elizabeth Perry, University of California, Berkeley; Jonathan Spence, Yale University; Andrew Walder, Harvard University.
The Gate of Heavenly Peace - Film Credits
The Gate of Heavenly Peace - Television Credits
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