Series Site
"BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JUNE commemorates the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, referred to in mainland China as 六四事件 – the “June 4 incident”. None of these movies adopts an explicitly polemical stance; instead, it’s a necessarily imperfect selection of works shedding light on the botched dreams and secret economies that came after the Cultural Revolution, but before the liberalizations of the 1990s – a process that led, of course, to the present moment’s extravaganza of state-managed turbocapitalism. In the spirit of the infamous “tank man” photograph (iconic to the rest of the world, but scrubbed near-entirely from the Chinese internet), this series takes a look at the cultural context surrounding the 1989 protests (and, implicitly, their bloody suppression) in media res." —Spectacle