They were mere kids — 16, 17 years old — and they were thrusting themselves into the maw of one of the 20th century's most impenetrable mysteries. Communist China.

They became the first teenagers from the West ever to visit the still fledgling communist regime. Twenty (plus five teachers), all from Hamilton, two each from the city's 10 high schools. First school trip behind the Bamboo Curtain. No American, European or other Canadian student excursion had previously been allowed.

"This was Hamilton. This kind of stuff doesn't happen to us." Elaine (Krysko) Munro tells me, explaining why she signed up. "To this day, I've never forgotten that physical feeling when I was called to the principal's office and told to clean out my locker. I was going to China. In four days!

"I thought I was going to have a heart attack."

It was 1972, and the West's understanding of this colossus looming on the other side of the world was clouded by clashing exaggerations; their propaganda, and our own.

In those days, when people here thought of the China created by the 1949 Revolution, it tended to be in the dark brooding colours and apocalyptic brush strokes of "The Manchurian Candidate." We saw a closed-off, repressive and militarized society, with the disciplinary rigour of an ant colony, and the brain-lock of a cult, some billion strong.

But what then-student Dan Kislenko saw, first-hand, and what he filmed with his Super 8 camera (with virtually no interference from the Chinese), was a far more human reality.

"Our Chinese hosts were wonderful," he says. Dan still keeps an orange bird made of plastic strips handed to him by a Chinese child he met. "They were so giving, despite having so little."

The footage he came back to Hamilton with provided raw material for a 1974 National Film Board movie, "Impressions of China."

It was a huge success (won the blue ribbon at 1975 American Film Festival) and made the rounds at campuses, schools and libraries all over the continent and as far away as Australia. In time, interest waned and it was mothballed; recently, after several decades, it was rediscovered in the NFB vaults.

Impressions of China, now restored and digitalized, is enjoying a second life, of sorts, in a very different geopolitical environment; this weekend it's being premièred in Montreal at the China Canadian International Film Festival. Dan and Elaine, who narrated the film, are there, at the invitation of festival organizers and the NFB.

"I figured something was going to come of this (China trip) and if I have a camera, I'll have a leg up," says Dan. A leg up on history. "I belonged to the fledgling A-V club at Westdale. Video was immensely complicated back then."

Nonetheless, the images he got were high quality and supplemented by footage shot in 16 mm by teacher Jack Parr.

The only restrictions imposed by the Chinese, says Dan, were: Nothing on the subways and no military. "But the army was mingling everywhere so you'd capture that."

The imprint of that trip is as clear today as then.

"It was life-changing," says Dan. "For me, back then, Niagara Falls was the other side of the world. And here we were in this alien, taboo situation, people completely unlike you." And yet somehow utterly relatable.

The Canadians were as alien to the Chinese as vice-versa.

"I wore a scarf a lot," says Elaine. "It was so hot, and my (thick, curly) hair would get so big in the humidity I thought it would scare them."

"The Chinese were very interested in us," remembers Dan, "Most had never seen a white person. One of the girls was six-foot-one with blond hair. They'd stand and stare. If you walked toward them, they'd move back to preserve the proper distance."

No one in the group knew the Chinese better than Jim Forrester, school board superintendent of geography, whose idea the trip was.

He'd visited China in 1966. A teacher then, he spent summers organizing world trips. He unbelievably got the Chinese to agree to let his group in at the end of a Hong Kong visit. When the group reached the border, they were rebuffed. The official Jim had been dealing with said he "forgot."

But Jim Forrester, now in his 80s, is eight parts bull dog and would not let go. He wore the bureaucrat down, waiting out excuse after excuse, until finally the man said over the phone, "Get your people packed; the train leaves in one hour."

But before they boarded, there was the matter of a "leaving fee." Wink, wink. Jim, ever the poker player, called the bluff and handed the man a bag of coins. "I don't suppose you have to count this, do you?" he said. Disgruntled, the man took it and they were in.

Back then, westerners still used the anglicized city names — Peking, Canton, Nanking. And the tallest building in Shanghai was 15 storeys high. They spent 10 days amid one of the country's most repressive periods, the Cultural Revolution.

"The Chinese stinted at nothing," Jim says. They showed the westerners what they wanted to see and were generous, though the officials were disingenuous. '"What's this about a 'Cultural Revolution?' they would say, and lie to your face. Fascinating.

"But we would see the spontaneous marches and we'd be invited to join, and people would be dragged out of offices (if they were suspected of wrong thinking)."

Upon returning, he was interviewed by the Globe and Mail, The New York Times, everyone hungry for news of China. The trip instilled a throbbing passion to return.

When Jim and some students, on a trip to preview the building of Expo 67, ran into some Chinese at their in-progress pavilion, an idea took hold. School trip. It took five years, and the hidden hand of no less a champion than Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Elaine wanted to go, kinda, why not? — until she had to write a 5,000-word essay. Uggh. "But I did it. Then there were huge, long gaps."

Jim had approval in principle for the trip, but the snags were innumerable and the delays — the "huge gaps" — endless. He visited Ottawa five times and still no departure date.

Relations started thawing with China under Trudeau. And in the United States there was Nixon's ping-pong diplomacy and his famous visit.

But at ground level, where Jim and the student candidates for the trip lived, it seemed nothing had changed, despite support for the project. John Munro, Lincoln Alexander, and many others got behind the trip (Linc managed to loosen up $2,500 for the trip from city lawyers in less than a week).

But others vehemently objected. Why were our students going to a Communist country?

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With hopes flagging, Jim, ever the scrapper, got a ticket to a Hamilton dinner where Trudeau would be appearing and buttonholed him at the end.

"People crowded around, I got as close as I could and just said, 'China!' He said, 'What do you want to know about China?'" Jim told him about the trip, Trudeau simply said "good luck," but the next day as he was mowing his lawn, Jim's wife came out with a message to call the Chinese embassy.

"They told me, 'It is granted. You leave Saturday.'" Yikes.

The trip. It became real. It was all so rushed ("We'd sleep all night on a train," Elaine recalls, "then wake up in a different city") but it was all so rich, and forever abiding.

"The biggest impact for me was the people. So many moments, eye to eye. We could feel their eagerness to laugh, smile, share."

So much still stays with her — for instance, visiting a hospital on the outposts. "We saw a camel. It was near the desert. In the surgery area, they were operating on people split open but still awake, with acupuncture (for anesthesia). I saw a tumour removed from a man's throat. He was conscious and blinking through the whole thing."

Dan recalls the show of soldiers at the border as they came in from Hong Kong, "in special uniforms that made them look bigger" but once inside there was no intimidation.

"The Cultural Revolution was over by this time and most of the excesses had ended, the pillorying of teachers and the 're-education.'"

In fact, he muses, the only heavy hand came from Jim — and deservedly so. "They took us to a steel factory, rudimentary by our standards. We walked over a perforated floor with molten steel beneath us and I said, laughing, 'Stelco's got nothing to worry about.'"

Jim, whose motto was "ignorance breeds arrogance," did not like the tone — they were visitors, after all.

"He took me aside and dressed me down verbally," says Dan. "Of course, the irony is obvious now." Stelco had lots to worry about from China.

Jim, who now has been to China eight times, remembers that the 20 students he took to China. They were hand-picked and exceptional. He can hardly find the words.

"They were marvellous. They really spoke up for Canadian values."

The next year a group of Toronto students went. Results? Not so good. China cancelled all student trips from the West after that.

'Impressions of China' Don McWilliams wasn't sure what he had on his hands. Some China footage from a Super 8, some from a 16 mm. A go-ahead from the National Film Board to produce something that would catch sparks from the historic nature of a Hamilton student trip.

He decided to structure the movie around a voice-over narration.

Dan Kislenko and Elaine (Krysko) Munro had both spent much time visiting organizations and other schools to talk about the trip. Elaine wrote a lengthy article about it that Chatelaine magazine published in 1972.

So they were chosen. "They just talked about the trip, I recorded them and put the visuals to that. It was tricky, because it had to be cut to classroom length, 22 minutes."

Once the distributors got hold of it, "Impressions" just took off. "School boards and libraries were buying it, not just in Canada but the U.S. It won a blue ribbon at the American Film Festival in 1975. It actually made money." Don credits Elaine and Dan. They were naturals.

"People couldn't believe they were students. They were called 'frighteningly articulate.'

"The film had its life for about five or six years," says Don.

He was surprised as anyone when it was rediscovered recently. "It was so long ago."