Mao Zedong’s era was called the “Great Leap Forward” but in China’s modern history, the era ended with a “great famine.” In 1957, the country’s Baihua movement faced criticism. Regarding the opponents as anti-right-wing, Mao puts Deng Xiaoping in charge of sending them to a labor camp. In December 1957, the first 2,300 inmates arrive at Jiabiangou Labor Camp located near the Gobi Desert in Gansu Province. This camp, which would have imprisoned 3,200 inmates, has about 500 survivors. In 1961, the camp was closed down and the survivors were forced to keep silent. No photo or film about this remains. In 2005, Wang Bing began to listen to the survivors. He met about 120 of them and recorded over 600 hours of testimony. Here are the testimonies of 15 survivors. One of them barely managed to speak and died soon afterwards. The inmates’ testimony is different from that of the prison officers. What really happened there? History survives in memories and these testimonies linger in eternity, painfully. Dead Souls is equivalent to Shoah by Claude Lanzmann. (Jung Sung-il)