“Urumqi Middle Road” / IMDB
“Urumqi Middle Road”, de Plato
They were the biggest public demonstration in recent decades in the country. A director accompanied the protesters, and will now face more than 3 years in prison.
Chen Pinlin33 years old, also known as “Plato”, was convicted of “provoking disputes and problems” — a crime often used by the Chinese government to silence dissent and arrest activists, lawyers and journalists, says .
His crime was to have filmed what became known as the “White Book” (in reference to Mao Zedong’s ultra-communist “Red Book”).
The media started when a deadly apartment fire in the western city of Urumqi, in November 2022. Many civilians believed that pandemic lockdown measures had hampered rescue efforts in that incident, and began to protest.
At that time, China had already faced 3 major confinements, and citizens, also angry with the unstable financial situation that Covid-19 had brought to them, took to the streets. And the protests soon reached enormous proportions.
As big as these, only in 1989, when a movement of students protested in the streets and was silenced through a bloody massacre by armed forces tanks on the population.
And the filmmaker recorded the 2022 episodes, and premiered his feature film in 2023. In Chinese, the documentary is titled “Urumqi Middle Road” (The Middle Street of Urumqi) — an allusion to the street where protesters gathered in Shanghai.
The director was arrested and now he will face more than 3 years in prison. CNN recalls that China is at the bottom of the annual press freedom ranking table, in 172nd place among the 180 that the index evaluates.
Like many young people who took part in the protests, it was the first time that Chen voiced his political demands in China when he took to the streets of Shanghai on November 26, 2022, according to a post which published at the time the documentary was released, says CNN.
“I hope to explore why, whenever internal conflicts arise in China, foreign forces are always considered the scapegoat. The answer is clear to everyone: the more the government deceives, forgets and censors, the more we have to talk, remember and remember”, said Plato.
“Only by remembering what is ugly can we fight for the light. I also hope that China will one day embrace its own light and its future”, he concluded.
