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[email protected] The Film During China’s Cultural Revolution, one of the most tragic and least understood political upheavals of the 20th century, Mao Zedong’s call to “make revolution” was answered by tens of millions of Chinese…and one American. THE REVOLUTIONARY is a feature-length documentary film about the Maoist era and Sidney Rittenberg, an American who assumed an unprecedented role for a foreigner in Chinese politics. In those calamitous times, Mao’s last stand to hold on to power and to his political legacy, Rittenberg rose to prominence—the most important foreigner in China since Marco Polo. As a college student in the American South of the 1930’s, Rittenberg had taken up the cause of labor and of civil rights. He arrived in China as a GI at the end of World War ll and stayed to join the communist side in the civil war that brought Mao to power in 1949, the only American citizen to become a member of the Chinese Communist Party. He worked side-by-side with the Party leadership in the politically important Broadcast Adminis- tration, in charge of the English-language section of Radio Beijing. He also was a trusted translator of Central Com- mittee documents and of Mao’s Collected Works. At the height of the Cold War that isolated America from China in the 1950’s and 60’s, China was consumed by a political and ideological struggle that reached its climax in the Cultural Revolution, since labeled “China’s Holocaust.” It was an era of widespread destruction in which millions died, that all but destroyed the Chinese Communist Party, and whose reverberations are felt to this day.