In 2018, Wang began exploring shamanic culture in Northeast China, developing "pan-shamanism" to evoke collective experiences across time. His project, Tungus investigates the history of Changchun during the 1948 Kuomintang-Communist Civil War siege, where mass starvation occurred. The film follows two Korean soldiers from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army attempting to flee, paralleling the Jeju Uprising in Korea. The Korean Independent Divisions were formerly known as Korean Volunteers Army, a Korean peninsula independence organization led by Kim Won Bong in Hankou, China, in 1938. Over many years of recruitment and expansion, it enlisted Koreans who had fled to China and ethnic Koreans living in northeastern China, playing an essential role in the anti-Japanese war with the Communist and Nationalist armies. Later on, it was assembled into the Northeast Field Army of the Chinese People's Liberation Army during the Kuomintang-Communist Civil War. In 1949, with the conclusion of the war, tensions mounted on the Korean peninsula. The three Korean independence Divisions returned to Korea and joined the Korean War. In the film, a scholar, hallucinating from hunger, imagines himself at the 1919 May 4th Movement. These overlapping narratives suggest shared traumatic experiences can lead to collective pan-shamanism, reshaping Northeast Asian realities and uncovering contemporary geopolitical dilemmas rooted in historical trauma.
Screening times: 6 pm, 7.30 pm, 8.45 pm