About the film: After Sichuan Daily reporter Zeng Boyan was labeled a rightist in 1958, he was sent to Shaping Farm in E'bian County, Leshan, Sichuan to be re-educated though labor. It was there that he witnessed several hundred other teens wander about the virgin forests before the farm, performing heavy labor as he did. He was completely shocked. Before long, these children and others who had been taken in from around Sichuan were sent to Dabao Operation Zone, a section of Shaping Farm, to commence their work-study re-education career. Then, these children were hit with the brutal impact of the great famine sweeping across China.
In this documentary, Zeng Boyan, now grey with age, gives a clear recount of this period in history. He takes great effort to find fellow survivors from Dabao in the Sichuan and Chongqing area, transporting audiences to Dabao through lively interviews with the juvenile inmates, rightists, doctors, researchers, and villagers that are sure to touch their hearts. In the early stages of editing the film, Sun Yat-sen University professor, filmmaker, and activist Ai Xiaoming wrote in a review, "With this film, [Xie Yihui] has surpassed the milestone independent historical documentary, Searching For Lin Zhao's Soul" (Ai Xiaoming, "Survivor Testimony of Former Chinese Re-education-Through-Labor Juvenile Inmates: On Xie Yihui's Documentary Juvenile Laborers Confined in Dabao" [中国少年劳教犯幸存者的证词：致谢贻卉谈她的纪录片《大堡小劳教》], March 29, 2013,http://aixiaomingstudio.blogspot.hk/2.... An English translation of Ai's review is available from Human Rights in China at:http://www.hrichina.org/content/6635.)
About the director: Xie Yihui(谢贻卉) (given name Xie Linrong [谢林蓉]): Born in Chengdu, Sichuan in 1967, Xie for a long period worked in human resources, and has been unemployed for a brief period as well. Xie became acquainted with documentary filmmaking when she assisted Ai Xiaoming in making a film following the Sichuan Earthquake in May 2008. In 2009, Xie and Tan Zuoren conducted an investigation into the names of the children who had died in the earthquake. In 2010, Xie borrowed filmmaking equipment from her friends to shoot her own documentaries. She finished her film, Starvation Report on Rightist Li Shengzhao (右派李盛照的饥饿报告). In 2013, Xie completed Juvenile Laborers Confined in Dabao (大堡小劳教). Her films are themed predominately around modern Chinese history, particularly that in and around Sichuan.