"When The Bough Breaks" (dir. Ji Dan)

Ji Dan‘s When the Bough Breaks will screen on Monday, February 20 and Wednesday, February 22nd as part of the Documentary Fortnight at MoMa. The American premiere of the documentary will be followed by a discussion with director Ji Dan.

Documentary Fortnight summarizes the film as follows:

Two girls growing up in poverty on the outskirts of Beijing seek to ensure a better future for themselves and their brother. Determined to continue their education, the girls square off with their stubborn, troubled parents. The family’s tense exchanges are captured as the young women try to negotiate a path to independence, security, and adulthood. The film shows how some children are forced to grow up too early, with little support and no adults to lead the way.

 

Alison Klayman (alisonklayman.com)

Alison Klayman is a journalist who, while living in China from 2006-2010, produced radio and television for news sources such as  NPR’s “All Things Considered,” AP Television, Voice of America, Current TV, and CBC. She is the director of the documentary film Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. I spoke with Alison at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah about the film’s trajectory, the role of social media in making bringing this story to life, and her working relationship with China’s most notorious artist and filmmaker. Thanks to Alison and her team for their cooperation.

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dGenerate Films: Can you talk a little about the origins of your working relationship with Ai Weiwei and how the project got started?

Alison Klayman: I had been living in Beijing for about two years when my roommate, Stephanie Tung, who was working at Three Shadows [Photography Center, a gallery and cultural center in Caochangdi, Beijing] got me involved in an exhibition they were doing of Ai Weiwei’s photos from New York. The photos are kind of a“greatest hits” series of contemporary cultural figures in China and provided an interesting window into this cross-cultural understanding of New York that I was really drawn to. I was kind of underemployed at the time and Stephanie suggested I make a video to accompany the exhibition. Rong Rong [photographer and Three Shadows director] gave me the okay and I went from Three Shadows to Weiwei’s house with the camera already rolling. It was really natural and organic. I didn’t just show up at Weiwei’s door and say “I’m fascinated by you, I want to film you.” We finished the video and Weiwei liked. I think it showed who he really is—very charismatic and engaging, fun-loving, doesn’t take himself too seriously. And then projects just kept coming up, so I feel compelled to keep filming. That’s kind of the beauty of Beijing—it’s very open and you can easily fall into these kinds of projects unexpectedly.

dGF: The film opens with a very loaded quote about Ai Weiwei’s cats and the fact that, if one of his many cats hadn’t learned to open the front door, no one would know that cats were capable of opening doors. This opening seems to speak both to Ai’s status as a maverick and also brings to mind Deng Xiaoping’s famous declaration that “it makes no difference if a cat is black or white so long as it can catch mice.” Can you discuss this opening?

AK: We tried out a million different openings. I was really uncertain how I wanted to open the film—we even had a different beginning at the screening at Art Basel. I wanted to audience to meet Weiwei first as an artist, one on one. Ultimately, I felt this opening gave the film somewhere to go and gave momentum to many of the storylines, especially the projects related to the Sichuan earthquake. It’s also telling because Weiwei’s house is just filled with cats—animals everywhere.

On the level of allegory, I think this represents the idea that Weiwei is part of a generation of like-minded people, but he’s still a unique case. It’s this fact that makes the film engaging, the fact that he’s completely unique and kind of one-in-a-generation.

dGF: How did you conceive of your audience as you were editing, in terms of their knowledge of China and of Ai Weiwei?

AK: I did post in New York with an editor who had no background in China and no Mandarin language skills, so this gave me perspective on what people know and don’t know about China. I really had no idea beforehand. I designed the film to add value for those who are familiar with Weiwei and get to know him in a new way, but I made the overall assumption that people didn’t really know anything about him.

Now, after his detention, I have to question what people really do know. Sure, people are more aware of Ai Weiwei, but I think this creates more of an appetite for information than a preconception. After the detention, I contemplated changing the film to open with this story-line, but I now see the film as a chronicle of everything leading up to the detention. We had no need to reverse engineer the film.

dGF: In the film, [Chinese art scholar and curator] Karen Smith says of Ai Weiwei’s art “because it’s Chinese, it becomes political.” This seems like a telling description of how even without a topic as politically divisive as Ai Weiwei, any story about China can be politically charged these days. How did this idea inform your storytelling or approach to the film’s inherent politics?

AK: This was an entry point to a lot of aspects of the film. I’ve seen Ai Weiwei interact with a lot of journalists and react to people’s expectations. I think these expectations are what Karen is alluding to. I think people applied the term “dissident” to describe him far before it was applicable. On a certain level, it has to do with anticipating expectations—of existing on a public stage—even though he’s on a public stage all of the time with twitter and press coverage.

Also, there’s an emphasis on what is real vs. fake in Weiwei’s art, so I was curious to know to what degree his politics are genuine. I wanted to know if his political convictions are genuine or more strategic. I’m convinced now that he’s genuine. He puts forth a set of values rather than a plan for political reform and it’s these values that make him a popular figure.

from "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry"

dGF: Social media has played a huge role in the film’s existence, from Ai Weiwei’s use of twitter to the kickstarter campaign to help finance the documentary. How do you hope social media will be used in the distribution and future of the film?

AK: Social media has been crucial so far. [Twitter founder] Jack Dorsey is a supporter of Ai Weiwei and we’ve had messages from twitter employees saying that Weiwei is an inspiration for what they do. We’ve had meetings in New York and San Francisco, but it’s all still really new, so it’s hard to say how we’ll work to promote the message. It’s a message that’s about much more than just promoting a film. In some ways, the film is a contribution to the history of social media. There aren’t a lot of historical twitter films—this may be the first. I think it’s a challenge for filmmakers regarding how to go forward with telling social media stories and giving a physical presence to these platforms that aren’t physical.

It’s also worth mentioning that I was really struck when I asked Weiwei what, to him, was a watershed moment in his life and he said “the internet.” At first I though, of course, the internet was a big deal for everyone, but this was a truly profound development for him. It wasn’t just a sidenote.

dGF: Can you talk about your experience with Ai Weiwei’s detention? How did this impact you personally and how did it impact the film?

AK: I actually found out through social media, maybe an hour or so after he disappeared, but before his studio was raided. I was in New York and stayed up until maybe 5am, skyping with studio assistants. They were tweeting from his account, acknowledging that it wasn’t him writing the tweets. It was really an all-sides attack on twitter, so I stayed up following [the assistants’] good flow of information.

By Monday morning, it was a big story and I had emerged as a go-to person who was an expert on Ai Weiwei, was in New York, and had strong personal feelings about what was happening. I think I probably had two years worth of media training in a few weeks.  As far as the film is concerned, I took a week long-break from the footage after he was detained. When I came back to editing, I felt a sense of obligation to just finish telling the story. It was tough—a lot of the footage from happy times felt really sad. For a while, it wasn’t looking good. We feared he was going to come up against Subervsion charges, but I really couldn’t stop working. I just wanted to get the film out into the open, to create awareness, so we were just rushing forwards. The day he was released was really the best day ever. It was just so great. The things that’s funny is that, after everything, Weiwei still had the same cell phone number. There was a tweet about a text message he had sent from that number. I later heard from [UCCA director, featured in the film] Phil Tinari and he said he’d just given Weiwei a call and he answered. So I did the same.

dGF: Speaking generally, how do you—as an American—conceive of yourself as the person telling this story? Additionally, you interview a group of people—both expats and Chinese—who occupy a fairly specific echelon of Chinese artistic culture. How does this influence the way the story is told?

AK: First of all, I never saw this movie about someone who doesn’t have a voice. It’s not a story that hasn’t been told and I never set out to speak for someone else. I wanted to present a good, honest, behind-the-scenes portrait of someone who belongs to the world. I spoke with some of Weiwei’s friends who thought he was an American citizen, but in fact, he’s let his green card lapse. As far as the community represented is concerned, I really just want to feature good storytellers telling a good story. I wanted to stick to people with real cred, who know Weiwei, who are close to the world he lives in. In any case, it’s clear that Ai Weiwei is really a global figure.

"Old Dog" (dir. Pema Tseden)

By Maya Eva Gunst Rudolph

At the Slamdance Film Festival, where Pema Tseden’s elegiac 2010 feature Old Dog made its US premiere last week, filmmakers are asked to share their “war stories”—the trials and tribulations of producing Slamdance’s class of often low-budget, off-the-grid films. While battling budget woes and zany locations mishaps is common among Slamdance filmmakers, Old Dog arrived in Park City with a self-evident “war story,” a sense of the political and poetic enmeshed in each highly emblematic frame of this story of an aging Tibetan herder and his eponymous mastiff.

Though Tibetan director Tseden was educated at Beijing Film Academy and cooperates with SARFT, Old Dog (the “uncensored” director’s cut screened at Slamdance) is a textually and contextually uncompromising film, laying bare a family’s struggle for integrity and tradition in a Tibetan mountain village. Tseden’s filmmaking—calm, measured, unafraid of long takes and wide, vacant shots—is certainly resonant with that of his Chinese contemporaries working in the independent sphere; identifiable as part of an aesthetic movement devoted to digital photography, stolid pacing, and a belief in the revelation of truth through minutiae. Indeed, as with many Chinese independent filmmakers of the past few decades, the juxtaposition of urban and rural, the geography of “development,” is crucial within Tseden’s lens both as a visual and social device.

Old Dog opens with Gonpo putting slowly into town on a scooter, dressed in customary Tibetan herder’s clothes with his raggedy mastiff trotting alongside the bike. The surrounding mountains are tremendous, almost disappearing into the sky. In contrast, the town is a pipsqueak. With its nondescript building flats and muddy roads, the town appears as a cracked root brought to life only by a few tiny details: pool players outside a small shop, kids (human) and kids (goats) playing together, goats watching a kind of urban tumbleweed (a plastic bottle container) blowin’ down Main Street. Gonpo has come to town to deliver yak butter to friends and family, including his police officer cousin, but he ends up in negotiations with Lao Wang, a Chinese trader who offers to buy the mastiff for a handsome sum. From the initial sale of the dog, the story stretches out with the efforts of Gonpo’s father, Akhu, to reclaim and protect the scruffy pup from further acquisition by traders or thieves looking to make a bundle selling the dog to wealthy mainlanders who keep Tibetan mastiffs as pets, as status symbols. It is Akhu’s struggle, both moral and physical, to keep the dog safe that drives the plot to an unexpected crescendo of violence and desperation, but Old Dog is remarkable for the textures that fill up the story and its seemingly empty spaces.

From the opening sequence of Gonpos’ sojourn into town, we encounter an aggressive, busy soundscape. The clink and roar of construction; the shrill call of pop music blaring from stores; the hum of a scooter’s motor; the bleating of goats; wind and insects; even the screechy blather of a Mandarin-language TV station in the family’s otherwise tranquil mountain home. Tseden is frugal with the movement of his camera and subjects and tends to hold a shot long after the frame is vacated by humans and animals, but the cacophony of sounds often overwhelms an abandoned landscape. In the film’s climactic moment, a prolonged event of mercy and brutality, the audience can look away if they choose, but the choked noises of this violent act are impossible to ignore.

Though the allegorical hand governing Old Dog can be heavy at times, even the most loaded metaphor is artfully incorporated into the style and narrative. Gonpo and his wife Rikso’s inability to bear children may suggest an heirless future for Tibetan traditions on a broad scale, but there’s no denying the uniquely human pain in Rikso’s face as she looks out on a courtyard of children playing. In a characteristically composed shot, Rikso and Gonpo stand symmetrically on either side of a school gates; her gaze is on the children, his out towards the distant mountains. The symbolic heart of the film may be the dog and a nomadic legacy being eradicated and somehow appropriated by the mainland, but what reverberates is this family’s desire for freedom. The few POV shots afforded the characters are almost all directed upwards, at the mountains or even the flimsy-looking police station that occupies the second floor of shoddy downtown building. This landscape, after all, is one of ups and downs, the topography that separates town and country and draws the fault lines between these two worlds.

In the end, Pema Tseden has crafted a roughly graceful film that exposes a world not often seen and, in a wash of flatly silvery light and pained expressions, leaves behind a sense of powerlessness before both the grandly natural and also that which is manipulated by man.  The film’s final moments are wide, sweeping shots of Akhu moving steadily through an incredible mountain terrain and disappearing over a hill; the sound of his breathing steady, heightened, and then fading.

"Though I Am Gone" (dir. Hu Jie)

With the release of films such as Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone (2006), Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007) and Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (2008), there seems to have been a growth of interest in recent years in the relationship between film, memory and the notion of witnessing in Chinese Language Cinema. The aim of this symposium is to explore this trend in relation to work produced in the People’s Republic, Hong Kong, Taiwan and diasporic China through documentary filmmaking, fiction film and video art.

This symposium has been jointly organised by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of Glasgow and Ricefield Chinese Arts and Cultural Centre as part of Takeaway China, a festival of film and photography from China held annually in Glasgow.

Among the dGenerate titles screening will be Xu Tong‘s Fortune Teller, Hu Jie‘s Though I Am Gone, and Robin Weng Shuoming‘s Fujian Blue.

For more information about the symposium and Takeaway China festival, including abstracts, speakers’ biographies and details of film screenings, please go to www.takeawaychina.com

This symposium is free of charge, but as places are limited all delegates much register by Friday, 20th January. For further information and to reserve a place please contact Dr Philippa Lovatt at p.lovatt.1@research.gla.ac.uk

After his screening series premiering many works from the Getting the Past Out Loud: Memory Projects at New York University, I spoke with filmmaker and Memory Projects organizer Wu Wenguang about the project, a new generation of filmmakers, and his view on screening works in the US. The event was held at the NYU Center for Religion and Media and co-sponsored by the Department of Cinema Studies, with generous support from China House.

Special thanks to NYU Professors Angela Zito and Zhang Zhen for curating the program and arranging this interview with Wu Wenguang. 

Wu Wenguang at NYU

dGF: When and how did the Memory Project begin?

Wu Wenguang: The project started last year. It was last summer that we had the opportunity to start this. It was during this time we first started going to villages to conduct interviews. It had to be summer, this was the ideal season for heading off to these villages. So, everyone headed off to their own villages, their hometowns, for these interviews. When they got back, everyone started to edit, give advice, collaborate. This is how we got started.

dGF: The majority of the people participating in this project as filmmakers are pretty young, born in the 80s or 90s. You’ve said that your generation’s view of cinema differs greatly from that of these young people. What do you feel you have to teach one another—what kind of exchange do you have?

WWG: These kids have a lot of confidence, real self-starters. I don’t know if I really can teach them much. We can simply work together. Sometimes, the people in these villages think I’ve taught them how to shoot and what to shoot. This isn’t the case; they’ve chosen how and what to shoot by themselves. What I have to teach them isn’t important. What is important is their own work and how they choose to conduct it.

dGF: In some of the films, the subjects express hesitation about having the films shown abroad. They’re worried that foreigners will develop a negative view of China or Chinese village life. As someone who works hard to have these films screened abroad, how do you reconcile this contradiction?

WWG: Yes, this appears especially in Zou Xueping’s film Satiated Village. The villagers expressed these kinds of misgivings. They are worried. They think foreigners won’t understand, will laugh at them. When you saw this film, did you want to laugh at them?

dGF: Definitely not. History is complicated.

WWG: It’s not even about history. It’s about human understanding. Would you look at this work and this, “You are so stupid?”

dGF: Of course not.

WWG: Right. But they are afraid, they even assume that you will look at them and say “You are so stupid.” But you won’t. They need to be told now that you would not say this, that you won’t laugh at them.

dGF: Jian Yi’s IFChina Original Studio has closed recently. What do you think about this? Does it create any concern for or have any effect on your Caochangdi Workstation?

WWG: I believe they are relocating to new location. I’m not totally clear on the events surrounding this. Why did they have to close? I think, overall, no one can really make them close their doors. There is no such thing as closing off this kind of organization now—we have email, we have internet. Nobody can stop you. Just one person—yourself—can stop you. No one else can force you to do anything. Even if they [IFChina] no longer have the cooperation of the University and they get kicked out, they can find some other place to operate. They’ll find a new place and continue to work.

dFG: I agree. So, this is the last time most of these works have screened in the US. How did you feel about the audience reaction?

WWG: This was about what I expected. The audience was great and received all the pieces really well. The best audience is one that really gets the work, will engage with the filmmakers and material. The best audience is one that really expresses interest in the work. They can come from any background and just come to watch, start thinking after watching. That’s the goal.

From L to R: Dan Streible, Angela Zito, Wu Wenguang, Zhang Zhen

“Independent film has gone from underground to come above ground.” Wu Wenguang’s most recent project in mentorship and documentary filmmaking, which made its US premiere at NYU under the title Getting The Past Out Loud: Memory Projects with Wu Wengugang, is an exploration of individual and collective memory, of personal storytelling, and of the evolving talents of China’s newest generation of filmmakers. The event was organized by Professors Angela Zito and Zhang Zhen at the Center for Religion and Media Studies at NYU, which Zito co-directs and was co-sponsored by the Department of Cinema Studies, where Zhang is Associate Professor. The event was also made possible thanks to generous support from China House.

Wu, often extolled to as the godfather of the New Documentary Movement in Chinese independent cinema, presented two of his own projects at the weekend screening series, but emphasized the significant work of those young people involved in the Memory Project.  “My generation of filmmakers often started out working within the state system, but we were dissatisfied and bored,” Wu expressed in conversation with Professors Zhang, Zito and Cinema Studies Professor Dan Streible. “Filmmaking twenty years ago was about throwing tantrums. The new generation is more introspective, they don’t need to throw tantrums. They’ve adapted a more authentic independent posture.”

The Memory Project, launched in 2010, was designed with as much credence to oral history and family succession as to extending documentary practices to the boundaries of Chinese village life. The aim of the Memory Project is to dispatch young filmmakers—mostly recent college graduates—away from urban landscapes and Wu’s Caochangdi Workstation in Beijing to their hometowns, the villages of their predecessors. Here, armed with digital cameras and a posture that is as earnest and curious as it is “independent,” these filmmakers being to unravel stories of village histories and politics, stories of their families and themselves. Five films, including Wu Wenguang’s most recent film Treatment and Memory Project participant Zou Xueping’s Satiated Village, screened at NYU. I was fortunate to see three screenings: Wu Wenguang’s 2005 Fuck Cinema and two selections from the Memory Project, Luo Village: Me and Ren Dingqi by Luo Bing and Zhang Menqi’s Self-Portrait With Three Women.

"Luo Village: Me and Ren Dingqi" (dir. Luo Bing)

Luo Village: Me and Ren Dingqi is a film by Luo Bing, a Beijing-based artist who returned to his ancestral village in Hunan Province to interview his grandparents’ generation about the darkest, most brutal years of the Cultural Revolution. While Luo’s exploration of the so-called “famine years,” the period of widespread starvation from 1958 to ’61 that accompanied Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, is often wrenchingly sad, his camera does not neglect the humor and irony of village life. The community in Luo Village is presented as one largely without bitterness, where a certain acknowledgement of their shared, albeit harrowing past allows the village elders to connect with one-another, and also with the young man holding the camera. Throughout his process, Luo searches for an elusive memoir written by his neighbor, Ren Dinqi, which is rumored to spare no detail in spelling out the days of Grandpa Ren’s life from unbearable suffering to redemption.

Luo’s pursuit of the memoir takes him away from the paths and courtyards of Luo Village and into quiet rooms laden with detritus—abandoned farm equipment, old tools, the remnants of a not-quite-forgotten time—where he questions what it means to remember, to record memory. “Did he write the memoir here?” Luo voice-overs, his camera probing the dusty surfaces of a dark room, “Did he write it because he suffered too much?” The forward motion of Luo’s camera is steady: opening doors, walking down paths. While the question of Grandpa Ren’s memoir carries a poignant narrative through-line, it is Luo’s encounters with neighbors such as Yu Maoli, that are most heart-stopping. A man clearly nearing the end of a terribly difficult life, Yu Maoli speaks with Luo Bing until his daughter, her voice needling from off screen, shrilly forbids her father from discussing the shadows of the past. Luo tries to reason with the daughter, asking what harm an interview can do in this day and age, while the camera remains on Yu Maoli. His lips move, silent and desperate-seeming, but no words come out— some memories are perhaps simply inexpressible.

"Self-Portrait With Three Women" (dir. Zhang Mengqi)

Zhang Mengqi is a filmmaker and dancer whose film Self-Portrait With Three Women represents a wholehearted attempt to reconcile personal history, from the corporeal to the abstract. With regard to her mother and maternal grandmother as both generational and emotional touchpoints, Zhang constructs a intimate narrative that blends the boundaries of physical spaces—bodies and dwelling places—with the intangible sense of memory, of passed time. Zhang’s approach to her indisciplinary autobiography is remarkably frank, incorporating voice-over biographical details and archival photographs and letters to set the record spinning into motion.

It is when Zhang delves into an exploration of blood-lines, sometimes literally interpreted through discussion of menstrual patterns and other moments of female adolescence, that she breaks with narrative convention and constructs a more experimental work of art fusing memory, speech, and body. After recording her mother’s discussion of various moments of both shame and triumph in Zhang’s upbringing, Zhang projects a close-up image of her mother telling these stories on her body. Here, her mother’s face illuminates and and colors Zhang’s contorted form like a stain. A vocabulary for modern dance is probably useful in describing these scenes, but the essence of Zhang’s performance—that which is written on the body, that which is shaped by gender and loss and family to form and deform the self—is undeniable. While a few moments of pleading self-discovery betray Zhang’s youth as a filmmaker and a woman, this Self-Portrait is unashamed, wholly concerned what it means to both embrace and even revile the conditions of the body, the limitations of legacy, the infinity of self-reflection.

While Zhang’s exploration is entirely her own, it’s difficult not to draw parallels between Self-Portrait and the project of another frequent Wu Wenguang collaborator and student: Li Ning‘s 2010 documentary Tape. Tape, a sprawling, inventive, and absorbing movement of brutal self-examination, follows Li Ning’s life as a father, husband, dancer, and teacher through years of Li’s most experimental and elemental moments.

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the screening of Zou Xueping’s Satiated Village, Zou’s second film in a series that portrays life and history in the filmmaker’s hometown. Zou’s earlier film in this series, completed in 2010, is entitled Starving Village.

The screening of Wu Wengguang’s 2005 documentary Fuck Cinema was highlighted by his discussion of the work as an unexpectedly personal effort that brought Wu and his legendary role in the Chinese independent filmmaking community into an unprecedented and relatively uncomfortable spotlight. Fuck Cinema tells the story of Wang, a migrant huckster so dead-set on seeing his autobiographical screenplay produced, he lives and breathes cinematic ambition, sacrificing every comfort and sleeping on the roof of a dormitory to see his dream realized. For all of Wang’s earnest perseverance and goofy naiveté, the revelation of Fuck Cinema unfolds an uneasy reality. Wang’s struggle is tripwired by arrogant directors, dismissive producers, and an industry that appears impenetrable and self-important, ugly even.

After appealing repeatedly and unsuccessfully to Wu for financial and structural support, Wang expresses his deep disappointment with world of cinema as it exists both inside and out of Wu’s camera. Wang now exists only as a subject of Wu’s dispassionate gaze; he’s a just a character in the lens of a celebrated filmmaker. What is this industry, this artistry in which Wu is so deeply engaged? What does it mean to shape someone else’s story? Wu’s physical absence from the frame and his passivity as a documenter speaks volumes, ultimately blurring the line between subject and object in an incomprehensible slew of cinema, story, industry, responsibility.

Intercut into Wang’s story are a series of audition tapes, pretty young actresses asked to speak their opinion about prostitutes. Without context, without direction, the women stumble through answers—what’s there to say? Wordlessness, a gesture towards the unutterable is the stagnant current of Fuck Cinema.  “Cinema is a complex idea,” Wu announced after the screening, “You say ‘fuck it’ when you don’t know what else to say. When the feeling overwhelms you.”

What has been accomplished by Wu Wenguang and the Memory Project seems broader than just a new approach to documentary storytelling, but suggests an important step in the evolution of Chinese cinema—cinema as self, cinema as history, even cinema as an overwhelming force.  In my experience, the 80-hou (born after 1980) generation is sometimes maligned as an indifferent collection of privileged and arrogant youths, “little emperors” with their focus always forward, self-absorbed without being self-aware. To the contrary, Luo Bing and Zhang Mengqi’s films are some of the strongest evidence I’ve ever seen to suggest the talent, mindfulness, and gratitude of the 80-hou generation. Certainly, these works lack the rageful zeal of this documentary legacy’s self-described tantrum-throwing days and films like Wu’s Bumming in Beijing (1990), but inspire a sense of uncommon introspection and acute understanding of narrative exchange, that a story can be a conversation. These film notably also show the 80-hou generation in a markedly different light than films like  Jian Yi‘s sometimes absurdist, reality-TV-centered documentary Super, Girls! (Jian Yi, one of the first filmmakers to focus on the 80-hou generation, also boasts a significant history of shared projects and creative exchange with Wu Wengguang.). Framing is impossible to ignore—Wu makes this much clear in Fuck Cinema—and the eye that focuses the camera can never be relegated to that of a mere spectator.

Whether addressing the political scars of the faint past or assembling facets of personal history, each filmmaker is completely present in their questions and answers, their consideration of a shared past and individual future. Wu Wenguang’s magnanimous efforts as a mentor and a supporter of young artists are giving rise to a generation of films not easily ignored. Sure, this is where the personal and political meet, but also where community and independence intersect to show how cinema can, and does, look.

CIFF Official Logo

Reporting for the Electric Sheep blog, John Berra delivers a comprehensive account of the sights and sounds of the 8th annual China Independent Film Festival. Commenting on festival highlights, Berra offers an opinion on Shu Haolun‘s No. 89 Shimin Road, a staple of the current festival circuit throughout Asia.

The turbulent political landscape of the late 1980s is filtered through a nostalgic lens in Shu Haolun’s No. 89 Shimen Road (2010), although reference to Tiananmen ensures that this engaging drama will not receive a mainland release. High school student Xiaoli lives with his strict but understanding grandfather in Shanghai following his mother’s relocation to the United States, and becomes romantically involved with two girls who represent opposing social ideologies; next-door neighbour Lanmi becomes an escort for easy money while classmate Lili is more politically motivated. Shu resorts to some coming-of-age clichés, but this is still an evocative snapshot of youthful uncertainty at a time of social instability.

The documentary program, which included Xu Tong (director of Fortune Teller)’s Shattered, “also offered a range of approaches to independent filmmaking, from studies of creative culture to self-portraits and undercover reports.”

Xu Tong’s Shattered (2011) follows Tang Caifeng, a woman with a chequered past (involvement in illegal mining and prostitution) who returns to her north-east home town to reunite with her father, a retired engineer who was educated under Japanese rule; Old Man Tang has kept many artefacts of the occupation, but his ‘living history’ is of greater value than the portraits of Lenin and Mao Zedong that clutter the home.

Reporting in a year that saw both significant struggles and triumphs for Chinese independent film and festivals in particular, Berra’s analysis of Chinese independent film in 2012 and beyond is well worth considering:

Due to the political implications of making films outside the system in China, not to mention the problem of securing exhibition and distribution for productions that lack the ‘dragon seal’ from SARFT, it is still appropriate to group such efforts under the ‘independent’ banner. Yet it should be noted that some films in this year’s CIFF line-up, such as No. 89 Shimen Road and [Jin Rui's] The Cockfighters, find Chinese independent cinema moving towards an American independent model by locating their social concerns within recognisable commercial genres, not to mention boasting production values that contrast with the ‘hand-made’ qualities of [Song Chuan's] Huan Huan or [Zhang Ciyu's] Pear.

On the basis of this year’s CIFF selection, the Chinese independent sector appears to have achieved a balance between artistic exploration and commercial aspirations; these potentially conflicting versions of ‘independent production’ are able to comfortably co-exist, mutually supporting one another due to the difficult circumstances under which both are brought to fruition by their directors. CIFF has also encountered difficulties in terms of accommodating the growing interests of directors and viewers within a limited space and schedule, but like the filmmakers that it supports, the festival has managed to find a measure of freedom within a world of restriction.

Shu Haolun's "No. 89 Shimen Road" won the top prize at CIFF, but wasn't shown on Awards Night.

The Nanjing-based China Independent Film Festival (28 October-1 November 2011), unlike the Beijing Independent Film Festival described previously, benefited from a substantial degree of official and semi-official “cover”. Unlike BIFF, there is a certain amount of practical compromise with official bodies and officially approved cinema: purity isn’t such an issue.  Co-sponsors include the Nanjing University School of Journalism and Communication, The Communication University of China (Nanjing) and the RCM Museum of Modern Art. The second day of CIFF includes a forum attended by local propaganda department officials. A sidebar of the festival (nicknamed the “Longbiao Section” for the dragon-headed insignia that appears at the beginning of all officially approved film prints in China) included screenings in a luxurious commercial cinema of several films that that are strictly speaking non-independent (i.e. censor-approved) but are made in a spirit of independence. These films would not appear at BIFF, for example, but might show later in official venues like Beijing’s Broadway Cinematheque MOMA, where approved “arthouse cinema” (i.e. non-commercial) finds a refuge in Beijing.

The core of CIFF, though, consists of four sections of new “unapproved” films: the feature film competition; a carefully curated set of documentary features — split in two, a “Top 10 Documentaries of the Year” section, and a set of new documentaries (the next ten best?); 2 sets of short fiction films; and two programmes of experimental films. Other sidebars included four films from Caochangdi Workstation’s Folk Memory Project and a Goethe Institute-sponsored set of films from the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.

Pema Tseden's "Old Dog" was screened in place of "No. 89 Shimen Road"

As with BIFF, CIFF’s selection of new features was problematic: there has been a worrying dearth of excellent, festival-worthy new Chinese indie fiction features the past year and a half (with a few notable exceptions: in particular a mini flowering of Tibetan language features led by Pema Tseden and Sonthar Gyal). And I think the awards reflected this. The jury (directors Wu Wenguang & Zhang Ming, NYU professor Angela Zito, novelist Sun Ganlu, and curator/critic Li Xianting) gave their Grand Prize to Shanghai director Shu Haolun’s bold first fiction feature No. 89 Shimen Road. That film’s direct evocation of the June 4 1989 Tiananmen protest movement, however, may have caused a slight programming hitch. The winning competition film is usually given a final prominent screening following the awards ceremony. This time, CIFF replaced it, for “technical reasons”, with one of the Jury Prize winners: Pema Tseden’s very fine Old Dog. The other jury prize winner was Wang Chao’s welcome return to independent filmmaking Celestial Kingdom, a rather conceptual work of fiction infused with a kind of cold moral fury at Chinese society’s moral collapse.

Though there were some stunning experimental features (expect to see a few at prominent international film festivals coming soon), most of the action and controversy revolved around the new documentaries. This is where heart and soul of Chinese indie filmmaking lives today. There is what one could call a mainstream school of Chinese “realistic” documentaries — let’s call them ultra-realistic docs — that dominates today, both in film festivals in China and overseas, and that preoccupies the academic, theoretical, critical discussion that has flourished around Chinese documentary filmmaking.

Briefly (and I know I’m oversimplifying, but I plan to write more extensively on this later), this school is derived from direct cinema, under the aegis of the cinemas of Frederick Wiseman and Ogawa Shinsuke. These filmmakers strive for a seemingly transparent, so-called direct representation of “truth” and “reality”, unmediated by authorial (i.e subjective) intervention. Their inspiration can be historical, archival or ethnographic, with filmmakers immersing themselves for months or even years in the lives of their subjects, then emerging with often very long documentaries that transform their experiences into cinema with minimal “subjective” distortions. Issues of ethics then emerge: the relative positions of the filmmaker and subject (are filmmakers intellectuals looking down on grassroots subjects from a position of “superiority”?); issues of consent and (mutual, explicit, endorsed) exploitation; the ethics of representation of the other; and the rights of audiences, directors, subjects, and so-called experts to challenge all these things. A refreshingly different school, recently activated in Chinese indie doc circles and in evidence at this year’s CIFF, takes documentaries as strictly personal, autobiographical, even prima facie solipsistic texts, and films and edits accordingly, highlighting the presence of the filmmaker and the interaction between what’s in front of and who’s behind the camera. This obviates a host of problems outlined above, but introduces its own very different issues of aesthetic criteria, social relevance, and moral obligation.

The filmmakers' declaration posted at CIFF (photo: Cinemascope Magazine)

These issues boiled over in a striking way at CIFF. As I reported in Cinemascope, a seminar on documentary ethics, attended by theoreticians, critics, and filmmakers, drew the lines, as directors struck back (verbally, though forcefully) at the academics for attempting to control the discourse around their films. The next day, we had something like a dazibao moment: dazibao are literally “big character posters”, like the kind Chinese Maoist youth used to use to denounce their counterrevolutionary elders 40 years ago or, perhaps more to the point, like the posters that appeared denouncing lack of democratic progress at the Democracy Wall during the so-called “Beijing Spring” in late December 1978. Many of the documentary directors, along with festival staff and audience members, worked to produce a two page declaration rebutting what they saw as an unwelcome academic hegemony over their art. The manifesto (titled Shamans · Animals) was posted outside the closing ceremony hall and distributed by hand (I translated the document into English at Cinemascope). And the controversy continues: someone else will have to summarize the final chapter of this continuing debate. Those of us attending the CIFF closing ceremony cum late-night party could see, through a glass door, an intense meeting taking place in an adjacent room, where the filmmakers and critics were still at it, continuing to hash out and perhaps resolve some of their differences.

It’s striking to see how critically engaged cinematic discourse is with Chinese politics and culture at the present moment: when nervous, insecure officials feel the need to interfere; and where practitioners and analysts engage with anger and passion. After just a month watching movies in China, it’s hard to imagine a national cinema where the stakes are higher right now.

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