Philip Short, the BBC correspondent who wrote the biography "Mao: A Life," hosts this two-part account of Mao Zedong's rise and the revolution he built. The first half traces the Chinese revolution from its roots through to the eve of the Cultural Revolution, laying out the ideology and the power struggles that put Mao at the center of the state. The second half covers the Cultural Revolution itself, from its launch in 1966 through the chaos of its early years to Mao's death in 1976, with the bulk of the story concentrated on the upheaval of 1966 to 1969. Short interviews sources on both sides of Mao's legacy, weighing the official Chinese state narrative against the Western view of Mao as a mass killer, and neither account is allowed to stand unchallenged. Rather than settle for the familiar hero-or-villain framing, the film sits with the contradictions: a leader who reshaped a nation of hundreds of millions and whose policies also produced years of violence and famine.