Screening: MAN IN BLACK (2023)

Join us for the fourth installment of Films at the Whitney’s Fall 2024 screening series, World Documentaries Today!

An eighty-six-year-old man stands naked in the empty gallery of Paris’s historic Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord—a setting that presents him as both an actor in and witness to his own memories. This is the film’s titular “man in black,” a figure scarred by years of political persecution. Wang Xilin, one of China’s most important modern classical composers, endured fourteen years of imprisonment, abuse, and torture during the Cultural Revolution under the Chinese Communist Party. This hour-long art piece serves as both a poignant tribute to his creative legacy and a testimony to the dehumanizing trauma inflicted upon him and countless others.

Directed by Wang Bing. Country: France, U.S., U.K. 61 min. Mandarin with English subtitles.