The latest issue of Hong Kong-based Open Magazine features three articles on citizens’ documentary in Chinese civil rights movements. One of them, written by Teng Biao, who is a human rights lawyer in Beijing, has been translated and published at Interlocals.net. See original.
In the article, Teng gives a comprehensive overview of the civic documentary movement in China for the past few decades. While the facts are impressive in both volume and numbers, the ideas aren’t all new to us. He writes,
Information monopoly is designed to benefit those in power, while Citizens Documentary can eliminate the cover-ups in certain extent. Only a few documentaries can already make the dictatorship pay a huge price. One can imagine that with the expansion of the Civic Documentary campaign, covering up truth will be a futile and obsolete attempt. Till then, there should be a significant change in the mode of power operation. (Interlocals)
Zhao Liang is one of China’s leading artists working in video, photography and documentary film. His work examines both rural and urban realities, fast-paced progress and nostalgia, the nature of politics, and the beauty of the natural world. He clearly connects with the underprivileged, whom he considers to be the engine of society, and homes in on the everyday aspects of life ignored by public institutions. He has directed two feature documentaries, Crime and Punishment and Petition, and his videos, photos and installations have been exhibited around the world.
To commemorate dGenerate Films’ release of Crime and Punishment, what follows is a transcript from Zhao Liang’s audience Q&A following a screening of the film at the China Institute on Feburary 5, 2010. Additionally, there are excerpts from a supplementary interview with Zhao conducted by dGenerate Films’ Kevin B. Lee.
Thanks to Isabella Tianzi Cai, Vincent Cheng and Yuqian Yan for their translation of the interviews.
1. From the audience Q&A following the China Institute screening of Crime and Punishment:
Question: Could you say something about how this film has been distributed in China and how it’s been received? Has it been screened in theaters? Has it been on the television as well as on the web?
Zhao: In China, this film was screened once in Beijing Independent Film Festival. Other than that, very rarely have people had the opportunity to see films like this, unless they go to certain art galleries where they might have such films. So it is definitely hard to have distribution done in China. Right now dGenerate Films Inc. in the United States is helping me distribute it here.
Question: Could you explain why you made the film?
Zhao: It actually happened by chance. I was actually doing another project in 2004 somewhere around the China-North Korea border. I was there actually through connection. I was trying to document the interactions between the Chinese police officers and also the people from across the border, the whole dynamic between the border police and how they deal with people from the other side of the border. And after I got there, I realized that they were not dealing with that issue any more. Instead, I got the chance to observe their daily lives and found them fascinating. So I decided to change that particular project and make something that could actually document their daily life.
Question: I found it really interesting that the soldiers actually allowed themselves to be filmed. I just wonder how that came about and what your sense was. Did they see the problem of what was happening and want it to be made available to the public?
In his coverage of the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival for Mubi Notebook, Doug Cummings offers his take on Du Haibin’s 1428:
Du Haibin’s 1428 visits the aftermath of the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and charts the reactions and interpretations of the survivors, who wrestle with severe personal loss and confusion. Sorting through debris and often gushing at the camera—in a variety of angry, philosophical, and grief-stricken ways—the people of the region express their sentiments about the Chinese government, cosmology, the media, and anything else of immediate importance to them. Lush green mountains provide serene visual contrast to the individual lives scrambling amid the rubble, but… the film never falls into postcard pictorialism.
dGenerate Films is proud to announce that Crime and Punishment by Zhao Liang and Using by Zhou Hao, two important works from China’s contemporary independent documentary scene,are now available for institutional purchase in the US as part of the dGenerate Films catalog. Together, these two films offer a candid, revealing look at two facets of crime and law enforcement in China: the interrogation tactics of military police in Northeast China, and the lives of drug addicts in Guangzhou.
Amidst the barren wintry landscape of Northeast China, Chinese military police officers rigidly enforce law and order in an impoverished mountain town. They raid a private residence to bust an illegal mahjong game, casually abuse a pickpocket accused of throwing away evidence, and berate a confession out of a scrap collector working without a permit. The police switch between precise investigative procedure, explosions of violent fury, and moments of comic ineptitude, all captured incredibly before the camera.
A prime example of how independent documentaries are on the vanguard of Chinese cinema, Crime and Punishment is an unprecedented look at the everyday workings of law enforcement in the world’s largest authoritarian society. With penetrating camerawork, Zhao Liang (Petition, 2009 Cannes Film Festival) patiently reveals the methods police use to interrogate and coerce suspects to confess crimes – and the consequences when such techniques backfire. With a cold, objective eye that depicts reality in great detail while withholding judgment, “Zhao’s artistry is instantly apparent.” (Robert Koehler, Variety)
In the January 2010 issue of China Perspectives, Jie Li of Harvard University has a lengthy appreciation of Zhao Liang’s documentaries Crime and Punishment and Petition. Here is an excerpt on Crime and Punishment:
With patient long takes and an ambivalent gaze that is in turn complicit, compassionate, or critical, Crime and Punishment shows us the human beings in military uniforms—their capacity for rage, sympathy, and fear—as well as how the power authorised by these uniforms might dehumanise—through violence and humiliation—not only those suspected to be criminals but also the police officers themselves. Apart from discipline and punishment, much police power resides with surveillance, but a sustained look at the other can also generate empathetic recognition, and returning the gaze may well be the first step for the powerless to empower themselves.
For three years, filmmaker Zhou Hao chronicled the lives of Long and Jun, a couple struggling with heroin addiction in Guangzhou. Zhou captures Chinese junkie subculture, its members languishing in a slum flophouse, the equivalent of a modern day opium den. When Long is hospitalized after a failed robbery, Zhou speaks out from behind the camera to intervene. Still, Long and Jun persist, soon dealing drugs full-time to make ends meet. As the couple increasingly offers lies for answers, Zhou must confront his ethical responsibilities to them, as a friend and a documentarian.
Using probes a dark, cruel reality of contemporary Chinese society that has rarely been seen by any audience. Addicts disclose techniques for dealing with police, confronting sham suppliers and staying high throughout the day. Zhou’s unflinching depiction of his friends’ repeated attempts to quit blurs the line between filmmaker and subject, and raises provocative questions about the ways in which each uses the other.
The Flaherty Film Seminar, a private, weeklong series of screenings and talks with filmmakers, scholars and enthusiasts, concluded another annual edition last month. This year’s Seminar was curated by film critic Dennis Lim with the guiding theme of “Work”. Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong attended the seminar, presenting his first two feature films: Street Life and Ghost Town, both distributed by dGenerate.
In ArtForum, Nicholas Rapold points out several highlights of the Seminar, including Zhao Dayong’s films:
Zhao Dayong’s lauded Ghost Town (2009) conjures a marginal community in the provinces—a former Communist workers’ village perched in the mountains. Its unification of artistry (Zhao trained as an oil painter) with social portraiture made the centrally placed film a capstone to the week’s percolating dialogue on how work forges identity. Accordingly, Zhao’s embedded look at the Shanghai homeless, Street Life (2006), offered a fascinating vision of unmade man: a prolonged finale showing one of the subjects (recently beaten by police) engaged in demented Situationist crumping in a public square under a Jumbotron.
The 1976 Tangshan Earthquake was one of the worst natural disasters in China’s history and believed to be the deadliest earthquake of the twentieth century. It had a magnitude of 7.8 and an estimated number of casualties between 212,419 to 719,000. Aftershock, director Feng Xiaogang’s dramatic feature about the Tangshan Earthquake, is set to be released July 22. Budgeted at 138 million RMB (over $20 million US), it is primed to be the film event of the summer for Chinese cinemas. To behold such a big-budget spectacular about a historical tragedy raises several questions about the film, chiefly: how it will recount the details of a historical tragedy while satisfying audiences as big-budget mass entertainment?
It is worth noting that the Censorship Board of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television of China gave Aftershock virtually no obstacle in production and distribution. Such lack of interference is very rare within the Chinese film industry. Many board members are said to have cried during the screening of the film, feeling deeply touched by the story. Clearly it is a state-approved account of history, every word, sentiment and action reviewed and approved. What bearing this has on the merits of the film remains to be seen upon its release. For now, we can contrast Feng Xiaogang’s production with another recent film about a similar historic tragedy in China.
In the online film journal Film Threat, Phil Hall recently reviewed Cui Zi’en’s ‘Queer China, Comrade China’, calling it “a genuinely fascinating look at Chinese sociology in a state of continual evolution.”
Hall’s review reiterates the issues raised in Cui’s work, which examines China’s LGBT culture and history through a number of insightful interviews from various political, historical, cultural, legal, as well as psychological viewpoints. He condenses the first half of the documentary as follows:
China was relatively late in openly acknowledging the basic civil rights of its homosexual population – it wasn’t until 1997 that the Communist government decriminalized “hooliganism,” as it was officially known. However, the acceptance of non-heterosexuals into a mainstream societal position has been complicated, although the resistance bears no resemblance to the religious-fueled homophobia that has become commonplace in the United States. Indeed, the film explains that same-sex unions are seen by many as a disruption of the yin-yang harmony within the Chinese mindframe and the disruption of the cohesive family unit that was stressed since Mao Zedong’s rise to power.
At CinemAsia Film Festival in Amsterdam this year, Chinese queer activist, writer, and filmmaker Cui Zi’en’s Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China was selected for an official screening followed by a panel discussion titled “Queer Asian Imagination.” The film was grouped with eight other LGBT films in the Queer and Asia program, a key component of CinemAsia. Cui met with the program attendees after the film and answered their inquiries about LGBT culture in China. Below are some YouTube videos documenting the Q&A session with Cui. Also present at the discussion were Michiel Baas from the International Institute for Asian Studies, Hong Kong filmmaker Kit Hung, CinemAsia board member Jeroen de Kloet, as well as Yang Jin, who appears in the film. In the videos below, Cui’s answers in Chinese are omitted, but were spoken in English by a translator (seen in the orange shirt).
Cui points out one major difference distinguishing Chinese gay population from that elsewhere in the world. “Many young Chinese gay and lesbians, they also go to gay bars,” he says. “But one difference is in China, they also aspire to get married as heterosexuals. I think that’s one of the biggest difference.”
Cui also notes the tension between the state and gay cinema in China today. He says, “The law environment in China is very different in terms of filmmaking. There are thirteen prohibitions in China in terms of movie-making. One of them is that you are not allowed to make a gay-themed film. That’s why you can’t see gay-related films in mainstream cinemas or film festivals. Even a Hollywood movie like Brokeback Mountain, when they tried to enter the Chinese market, it was impossible.”
The Laogucheng neighborhood in Beijing is being demolished. (Photo: Shiho Fukada, The New York Times)
The New York Times recently featured an article entitled “Trampled in a Land Rush, Chinese Resist.” In anticipation of the possible passing of new legislation to protect the rights of low-income homeowners, local officials and developers are rushing to take advantage of the current absence of regulation. In neighborhoods like Beijing’s Laogucheng, residents have united as a community, standing up to real-estate developers planning to level their homes and construct enormously profitable high-rises and greenbelts in their stead.
dGenerate Films is a new non-theatrical distributor of independent contemporary films from China. Our uncensored, award-winning films are selected for their artistic merit as well as their educational value. Films are available for purchase on DVD and VOD, as well as for exhibition rental and broadcast.
The latest issue of Hong Kong-based Open Magazine features three articles on citizens’ documentary in Chinese civil rights movements. One of them, written by Teng Biao, who is a human rights lawyer in Beijing, has been translated and published at Interlocals.net. See original.
