And let’s not act like communism only existed within the USSR.
about that... the fifth generation of chinese filmmakers were the first to graduate from the bejing film academy post-cultural revolution and in my opinion, produced some of the finest directors and films to ever grace cinema, e.g. kaige chen's yellow earth and zhang yimou's raise the red lantern.
what makes this class so unique is that many of the film makers did come from privileged backgrounds only to have everything stripped away from them during the cultural revolution, which i assume we all know was one of the most brutal transition periods in all of history.
zhang yimou for example was the son of a doctor and a dermatologist and during the revolution found himself working as a farm laborer and later a cotton textile mill for nearly a decade. he had to buy his first camera selling his own blood and developed the film using toliet water.
many of yimou's classmates had similar stories so you can easily imagine how they weren't exactly enamored with the communist party. their early films used a lot of allegory and metaphors to both work around the censors and as a means to critique the ruling party.
to get an idea of the hardships the chinese went through during the revolution, watch yimou's to live, which coincidentally is when he started to became a full communist shill.
he was boiging gong li on the side during this time so whose to blame him
anyways, imo chinese cinema has always been more pertinent to this discussion than say, fucking cuba or even russia. although they did have a hand, it wasn't exactly the government that killed this type of filmmaking. instead it was the rapidly changing economics of the country. let that sink in for a moment
