To Live - Movie Essay

Spencer Kim

To Live – Movie Essay

        The first thought that I had after the movie ended was that it was an incredibly poignant movie.  I felt a sadness for the characters we had just watched lose so much through the events put into place by communism in China.  It was a feeling of sympathy that had never truly resonated with me while learning about communist China during our class.  Although I had read about the terrible famine and executions done during the time, it was hard to empathize with statistics and descriptions.  Seeing the events recreated through film helped put the historical events into a human perspective of how everyday people were affected by these events.

        Moving forward, I think that using technology and media will be a powerful tool to help educate people about historical information.  With the advent of advances in virtual reality and augmented reality, there are countless possibilities of how to present historical events and information.  Using a virtual reality headset to allow a viewer to relive an event would be an enthralling, memorable experience in an entertaining manner.

        Watching “To Live” made me remember historical information we learned in class.  Two specific instances were during the Cultural Revolution when Fugui’s family was forced to burn his puppets because of their counter-revolutionary status, and when Fugui’s family dined in a communal dining hall.  Both events were hard to picture when reading in text, but seeing the visceral demonstration by live actors helped to create a clearer image in my mind.