The documentary "Twenty Nights of the Long March" will be launched on September 26, focusing on twenty key nights.

China News Service, Beijing, September 26th. The documentary "Twenty Nights of the Long March", a key documentary of the State Administration of Radio and Television's 2026 "Excellent Online Audiovisual Program Creation and Dissemination Project", will be launched on major online audiovisual platforms on September 26th, and Jiangsu Satellite TV will launch it simultaneously.

Poster for the online documentary "Twenty Nights of the Long March". Photo courtesy of the film crew

The online documentary "Twenty Nights of the Long March" uses "night" as the anchor of time and space, focusing on the twenty nights during the Long March that contained key decisions, life-and-death transitions, desperate perseverance, and faith tempering. It carries the grand epic with microscopic incisions and uses story-based, scene-based, and emotional expressions to make the history feel, the characters approachable, and the spirit palpable. It shows how the Chinese Communist Party and the Red Army used faith and wisdom to move toward light and victory step by step in a dark and desperate situation.

During the creation process, the creative team, under the guidance of experts from the Central Party History and Documentation Research Institute, systematically combed and researched first-hand precious historical materials such as the diary manuscripts of Red Army generals, original telegrams from the battlefield, front-line combat files, and memoirs of those who experienced it. They compared and repeatedly corrected the historical details, participating troops, combat processes, character details, decision-making background, etc. of each episode with multiple sources to ensure that every story is well-documented and every detail is historically based. In order to restore the historical scenes and unearth touching stories as much as possible, the film crew re-traveled the Long March, overcoming many challenges such as plateau hypoxia, changeable weather, and dangerous road conditions. They went deep into Jiangxi, Hunan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Gansu, Shaanxi and other provinces for interviews and filming. They traveled to snow-capped mountains, grasslands, river valleys and dangerous shoals, and visited the starting point of the Long March, important meeting sites, key battle sites, old meeting sites, and red memorial venues one by one. The total distance traveled exceeded 20,000 kilometers.

The film was jointly produced by the Seventh Research Department of the Party History and Literature Research Institute of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the Propaganda Department of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China, the Jiangsu Provincial Radio and Television Bureau, and the Jiangsu Provincial Radio and Television Station. It has a total of 20 episodes. The first 10 episodes will be online from September 26 to October 5, and the next 10 episodes will be online from October 11 to 20.