variety.com
26.01.2022 / 18:38
‘The Exiles’ Review: Tiananmen Square’s Legacy Intersects with a Filmmaker’s Life in an Eccentric, At Times Essential Doc
Jessica Kiang Given the Chinese government’s frighteningly successful attempts at retroactively erasing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre from history, there is an urgent need for a soup-to-nuts retelling of that incident, solidly laying out the facts and figures, insofar as they can be known. “The Exiles,” from debut directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, is not that film, although some of its most powerful sequences could be repurposed in their entirety to that end.Instead, Columbus and Klein present a palimpsest of erratically overlapping perspectives.