Production
The Gate of Heavenly Peace was produced and directed by Richard Gordon and Carma Hinton, who have collaboratively made numerous films about China. Their production company, the Long Bow Group, is a small non-profit company based in the Boston area. According to Gordon, "One of the reasons we wanted to make was to give more depth to movement and not just show the final, violent conclusion, which is where people tend to focus.” Despite the hundreds of hours of Western media coverage, Hinton felt that "everything was reduced to slogans and hand clapping. I wanted to hear more Chinese voices, because I knew they would show a range of opinion. We felt a film that did that could help open up people's minds about these events. It's not all black and white." In addition to Hinton and Gordon, China scholars such as Geremie Barmé, Gail Hershatter, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom helped to provide context and perspective. Over three hundred hours of archival footage were collected, and the film took over five years to complete. Says Hinton, "It was not an easy decision to get into something like this. I knew that any documentary - to say nothing of something of this scale, between the funding and the research and the actual making of the film - would probably take years of our lives. Once we decided to make the film, it did take nearly six years."
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—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)