"Beijing Besieged by Waste" (dir. Wang Jiuliang)

The jargon of “development” is paramount to any consideration of today’s China, from the obvious economic connotations to all the infrastructural expansion that is implicated within. Urbanization, structural changes, and population redistribution have long outpaced established modes of growth and the way life was once understood to be organized.

The signs of development are omnipresent; the vernacular we speak, the smoggy air we breathe. The immediate physical effects of such breakneck urban growth are readily apparent throughout China, but the deeper repercussions—be they ecological or social—of a culture of “development” remains perhaps largely undiscovered.

The documentaries below represent a few attempts to break down some of the effects of this whirlwind of urban development as the philosophy of development at all costs weighs heavily on the physical and social environment of a nation in flux.

Wang Jiuliang maps Beijing's ring of landfills

Beijing Besieged by Waste represents a striking example of guerrilla filmmaking that drives at the heart of a staggering byproduct of urban growth, consumerism, and general affluence: the piling waste of a culture increasingly tied to material. Beijing Besieged addresses a problem that is by no means specifically Chinese, but is imbued with a unique concern for the mounting landfills surrounding Beijing and the trash-scavengers who dwell in these liminal spaces of junk. Photographer and director Wang Jiuliang‘s tactics to find and uncover the stupefying scale and gutting reality of these landfills began with a google maps search and escalate to a revelation that challenges our understanding of so many buzzwords taken for granted: “development,” “sustainability,” and even “waste.”

"Before the Flood" (dir. Yan Yu and Li Yifan)

Over the past decade, China’s mammoth infrastructural projects have been widely discussed by numerous media outlets, though few have examined the social ramifications surrounding these groundbreaking structural paradigm shifts with as much thoughtful grace and insight as Li Yifan and Yan Yu‘s Before the Flood. The city of Fengjie in Chongqing Municipality, a city that has all but evaporated to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, has been flooded, reconfigured, and restructured as a symbol of the refraction of history and daily life that can result from such enormous projects. Tracing the individual stories of Fengjie residents and their struggle to preserve their homes and dignity against literal rising tides and hopeless bureaucratic machinery, Before The Flood offers a personal perspective on broad changes that are anything but. Following up this work, Yan Yu returned to the affected areas in 2008 to bring us Before the Flood II, another closely-observed account of a town—this time the historic village of Gongtan located on a tributary of the Yangtze River—and a bitter attempt to rail against the powerful force that threatens to inundate some sense of real life.

"Meishi Street" (dir. Ou Ning)

Another account of citizens fighting to maintain their homes and livelihoods in the face of grand urban development schemes takes a pointedly intimate perspective in Ou Ning‘s Meishi Street. Evicted from their homes and time-honored style of living closely, in shared livelihoods and quotidian patterns in hutong neighborhoods, the interruption of traditional space by the oncoming 2008 Beijing Olympics is told through the perspectives of the citizens of Meishi Street. A unique community filmmaking venture, as well as a poignant examination of the ruptures of both physical and emotional space created by a modern Beijing, Meishi Street is nothing short of an elegy for a lost city and a losing battle.

Development is about looking forward, charging outward and upwards into an uncertain future. But development is also about big plans, large scale, and immense movements that too often eclipse the concerns of the individual: health, family, and what it means to have more. The implications of presence and absence—of traditions, of physical bodies and materials—are delicate elements of this forward movement and nowhere better captured that in the lenses of these dedicated documentarians.

Beijing in focus

A new book from the World Film Locations series entitled World Film Locations: Beijing, edited by John Berra and Liu Yang, is available for pre-order. This exciting new title features “a series of spotlight essays and illustrated scene reviews, a cast of seasoned scholars and fresh new voices explore the vast range of films—encompassing drama, madcap comedy, martial arts escapism, and magical realism—that have been set in Beijing. Unveiling a city of hidden courtyards, looming skyscrapers, and traditional Hutong neighborhoods, these contributors depict a distinctive urban culture that reflects the conflict and tumult of a nation in transition. With considerations of everything from the back streets of Beijing Bicycle to the forbidden palace of The Last Emperor to the tourist park of The World, this volume is a definitive cinematic guide to an ever-changing and endlessly fascinating capital city.”

While World Film Locations: Beijing features discussions of many of the films that first made Beijing recognizable to world audiences in the 1990s and early 2000s, this collection of writings also highlight numerous dGenerate titles, including Liu Jiayin‘s Oxhide, Ou Ning‘s Meishi Street, and Cui Zi’en‘s We Are the … of Communism. Addressing the city’s historical legacy as a bastion of Chinese power to modern concerns of urban development and shifting culture through myriad cinematic lenses, World Film Locations: Beijing boasts writing from such scholars as Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, Seio Nakajima, and Grace Wang.

The book is available for pre-order here.

Director Liu Jiayin and her parents in "Oxhide"

Profiling Liu Jiayin, Andréa Picard praises Liu and the Oxhide series, musing “Who was this filmmaker who so maturely delineated the space of her imagination, carving a humanist monument from next to nothing?”
On these remarkable films that measuredly unfold an intimate world of family minutiae, Picard discusses Liu’s ”carefully calibrated yet warmly sensual sound and image construction, a droll humanism, and, ultimately, a feisty hopefulness.” 

Zhao Liang

Zhao Liang, called a “poet of justice” by reviewer Albert Serra, is described as an artist who “cannot simply describe social injustices, lies, abuses of power…because as an author he’s realized that “reality” itself is unjust and abusive. And it’s absurd to find a way to fight against it because reality has as much power as the “system” does in China.” Of the careful examination of power and artistry at play in Zhao’s Crime and Punishment and Petition, as well as his dedication to pulling back the layers of the grueling injustices of Chinese beaurocracy, Serra writes: “With any other topic he could have been involuntarily serving the propaganda of what he’s criticizing, but the issue of the absence of justice turns our hearts with so much power that this is impossible.”

"The Search" (dir. Pema Tseden)

dGenerate films consultant and blog contributor Shelly Kraicer takes on an appraisal of the frontrunner of Tibetan new wave, Pema Tseden (in Chinese, Wanma Caidan). Of the director of The Silent Holy Stones, The Search, and most recently Old Dog, which is currently enjoying an international festival run, Kraicer says, “Given Pema Tseden’s extremely complicated position as a Tibetan in China, and the necessity of having his films pass stringent Chinese censorship, his ability to speak eloquently of individual despair and the emergency of cultural obliteration is masterful; his ability to do this in films of such eloquent, quiet beauty is nothing short of astonishing.” 

Reviewed by Chris Fujiwara, Wang Bing‘s work, which includes the films The Ditch and Fengming, a Chinese Memoir, is described as being imbued with “an attempt to imagine unimaginable (though real) conditions for human life, there is also a war-movie element, a working-over of the terrain, together with the becoming-mineral of humanity that recalls the hard-bitten, antiheroic sagas of Samuel Fuller, Anthony Mann, and Miklós Janscó.” 

Jia Zhangke, perhaps the Chinese filmmaker on this list whose reputation most predicts inclusion on such a list, is discussed by Tony Rayns as an inspiration to those filmmakers who followed in the footsteps of Jia’s early hometown trilogy: Xiao Wu, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures. “After Jia,” writes Raynes, “the flood. From the start, Jia had a genius for seeing and showing how larger social changes (political, economic, moral) impacted on individual lives.” 

"After Jia, the flood" Jia Zhangke's "Unknown Pleasures"

Congratulations to Cinema Scope for reaching this milestone and to all the directors who grace this list—the future is in your capable hands.

On 4/7, Zhao Liang, director of Crime and Punishment, blogged:

This is my dream: I hope that China’s next generation of directors can—in any theater, in any film—say whatever is in their heart without fear.  Our generation of filmmakers is working hard with the hope that the next generation will be free from fear. 

The director of Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, Though I Am Gone, and The East Wind State Farm, Hu Jie posted the cartoon to the right on 2/14 with the caption:
Citizen! Choice! Cartoon! Wisdom! 

From Hu Jie's weibo account

Xu Xin, director of Karamay, blogged on 4/7:

Fascism is a philosophy, rather than a course of action. The bad behavior we see is all driven by ideology. Any pursuit of unity of thought will certainly lead to violence and compulsive behavior. Violence is not strictly a characteristic of fascism, but a characteristic of singular thought. For instance, Chinese Confucianism is not fascism, but a singular branch of thought. It is only when outsiders are punished that violence ensues. 

Cui Zi’en, director of Queer China, Comrade China and one of China’s most outspoken advocates of Queer rights, blogged on 4/3:

In China, political neutrality = supporting the one-party system. Homosexuality is neither legal nor illegal =is not supported by the law.  

Disorder director Huang Weikai wrote on 3/11:

Harvey [Weinstein] has made a lot of good films, but also destroyed a lot of good films with his daring scissors. His edits to Farewell My Concubine really angered Louis Malle. This behavior is really brutal and sneaky. He can be really threatening with a younger generation of directors, but can even drive people like Martin Scorcese to the edge of sanity. If you read the book “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film,” you get a real taste of this demonic flavor. 

Xu Tong, the director of Fortune Teller, blogged on 4/3:

To open or not to open? To shoot or not to shoot? Initially, the world seems so quiet and peaceful, but people want to make distinctions and oppositions; no one is willing to wait for the other. This is how power is granted. Actually, the original world is the world of “opposites.” 

On the lighter side of the weibo-sphere, Meishi Street director Ou Ning posted the following photo of himself on 4/7, saying:

I forgot that I once had this hat. This is from a few years ago in Yunnan on Sun Zhou’s film Zhou Yu’s Train. 

Ou Ning tagged the photo "artistic youth"

A long time practitioner and advocate of self-documentation, Ai Weiwei made online waves last week when he installed a set of “self-surveillance” cameras to document his life and work via a live feed. Buttressing the demands for “transparency and openness” that characterize so much of Ai’s work, this project launched a tongue-in-cheek reaction to the government surveillance cameras that surround Ai’s home and workshop. Only days after mounting his latest “installation,” though, Ai was ordered to remove the cameras and the internet feed ceased to live.

The artist sleeps tonight on "Weiwei Cam"

In the aftermath of its short existence, the so-called “Weiwei Cam” has been discussed as everything from an exercise in artistic narcissism to a wry subversion of the Chinese government’s Big Brother-ing. It seems undeniable that at its crux, the camera project, launched to commemorate Ai’s eighty-one day detention last year, served as a kind of self-aware self-policing. After all, what harm could befall a man with the world’s eyes on him?

With the Weiwei cam censored last week, Ai tweeted, “The cameras have been shut down. Bye-bye to all the voyeurs,” sparking another school of thought on his act of radical transparency. A documentary filmmaker whose work often chronicles his own movements and artistic and activist efforts, Ai is no stranger to inviting public eyes to his personal dealings. For a figure such as Ai Weiwei for whom documentation is both a voluntary and involuntary way of life, much can be gleaned from this most recent experiment, which reflects a larger tendency of self-examination and voyeuriusm in Chinese documentary film. In effect, Ai Weiwei’s most recent project seems to fit into the greater scheme of self-documentation in Chinese cinema and a trend of what might be called extreme documentary.

"Tape" (dir. Li Ning)

In Li Ning’s hefty and often brutally personal documentary Tape, there is little of Li’s life left to viewer’s imagination. With his camera rolling, Li argues with his wife, laments his financial ruin, engages in all manner of literal and figurative contemplation of his lower anatomy, strips himself bare and endures the waters of experimentation, physical anguish, and creative guilt. With unflinching intimacy and a running time upwards of three hours, Tape should be a struggle, or at least a challenge to watch, but the viewer is more often than not transfixed by the profound and immediate access to Li Ning’s innermost life. This is, in Lacanian or Mullveyan terms, pure cinema, for Li Ning entices a rare and complete voyeurism. Li is no doubt both puppet and puppet-master, the cinematographer and editor of his own life; the choreographer and the dance itself. He is, like Ai Weiwei, a performer whose personal exposure before the audience is more than simply a negotiation or a collapse of the subject-object paradigm, it’s a kind of conversion.

The notion of extreme transparency is not limited to Li Ning’s raw self-exposure or Ai Weiwei’s exhibition of personal politics through daily activity, but seems to extend to a good deal of contemporary Chinese documentary. Perhaps some of this self-reflection is wrapped up in the concept of jiancha, a term used during the Cultural Revolution to mean self-criticism, but which suggests a renewed approach to examining the individual within the turbulent confines of Chinese society. Broadcasting oneself to invite indiscriminate voyeurism, despite the edge of narcissism and scopophelia suggested inherently, is a radical act in a society where the individual remains so conceptually and practically marginalized. Young Chinese documentary filmmakers, from Wu Haohao to those involved in Wu Wenguang’s memory project, are increasingly turning cameras on themselves, their own memories and bodies.

The audience’s intimacy with the subject/object likewise might suggest, in some cases, a directness and purity of narrative. It seems, though, that in these filmmaker’s efforts there is a kind of suspension of control that disables complete narrative authority. In Li Ning’s film especially, it’s apparent that the control the filmmaker possesses over the film is no different than the control the individual possesses over himself. But it’s the margins of this control, the unpredictable and highly vulnerable tenor of this willed presentation, that makes Tape, the Weiwei Cam, and many more such documentary events so electric–so extreme.

Ai Weiwei may have said goodbye to his internet voyeurs for now, but in the greater realm of Chinese documentary, there’s plenty more to see.

"Timber Gang" (dir. Yu Guangyi)

Timber Gang at University of Michigan

Address: 
Angell Hall, Auditorium A
435 South State St., Ann Arbor, MI

Description:
Yu Guangyi’s stunning debut explores a grueling winter amongst loggers in Northeast China as they employ traditional practices through one last, fateful expedition. Armed with a digital camera and survival gear, Yu Guangyi spent months filming the lumberjacks of his hometown, offering a privileged peek into some exceedingly harsh lives (Neil Young, Jigsaw Lounge). A lasting testament to disappearing traditions, Timber Gang “is a fascinating glimpse at a rare way of life that few will ever witness.” (Ain’t It Cool News)

More information and ticketing details can be found here.

Monday April 10 at 7pm and 9:30pm
Tuesday April 11th at 7pm and 9:30pm 

"Fortune Teller" (dir. Xu Tong)

Fortune Teller at The Trylon

Address: 
3258 Minnehaha Ave S, Minneapolis, MN

Details:
Armed with an HD camera, Xu Tong takes a long look at Li Baicheng, a traditional Chinese fortune teller, and his wife Pearl Shi, two people left behind in China’s dramatic push towards capitalism. A riveting portrait of life on the fringes, this brave documentary achieves a rare intimacy with its subjects that is both rewarding and heartbreaking.

Promotional support provided by the Hamline University Department of East Asian Studies. Fortune Teller appears as part of The Trylon‘s Premiere Series, coordinated by Take Up Productions 

More details can be found here.

"Old Dog" (dir. Pema Tseden)

This poetic film, heralded as the forefront of Tibet New Wave cinema, tells the story of a Tibetan herder whose struggle to preserve his culture, the dignity of his family, and his beloved mastiff crescendos in a tragic moment of sacrifice. Old Dog will screen on April 22, 23, and 27th in San Francisco. Details and tickets can be found here.

Also screening at SFIFF is Alison Klayman‘s documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which premiered at Sundance and received the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Prize for Spirit of Defiance. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry will screen on April 23rd and 25th. Details can be found here.

From China and Hong Kong comes Cai Shangjun‘s People Mountain People Sea, a story of corruption and revenge in Chongqing and Guizhou Province, which will screen at SFIFF on April 21, 23, and 25th.

SFIFF will also be screening two films from Hong Kong: Johnny To‘s Life Without Principle and Peter Ho-Sun Chan‘s Wu Xia. 

"Struggle" (dir. Shu Haolun)

Writer Mike Daisey was recently repudiated for fabricating numerous elements of his story “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory”, about working conditions at Foxconn, Apple’s Chinese supplier. The story ran last month on public radio’s This American Life, and quickly became the popular show’s most listened podcast of all time.

With its creative ruffling of truthful facts, Daisey’s monologue weaves a compelling piece of narrative theater, grave and curious and comprehensible. That Daisey told a story that sparked so much empathy, email campaigns and calls for investigations into Apple’s labor practices, speaks to the effectiveness of his storytelling. And perhaps it is precisely because Daisey positions himself as an uninformed foreigner in China that made him easily relatable to American audiences. But it is also what makes this type of reporting deeply troubling, especially as it concerns a society already prone to distortion and misunderstanding in the American media.

The documentary Struggle, directed in 2001 by Shu Haolun, tells the story of workers whose injuries due to abuses and accidents at factories like Foxconn. Shu’s direct access to the disenfranchised workers and their desperate attempts to seek compensation and peace of mind after being injured is unnervingly intimate and straightforward.

Shu Haolun is among a group of other Chinese documentary filmmakers whose work delves the very darkest corners and unglamorous margins of Chinese society. To produce these works, these filmmakers cultivate unusually close relationships with their subjects. To make her most recent documentary When The Bough Breaks, the story of a migrant family living in a Beijing garbage dump, director Ji Dan spent over a year living with the subjects of her film. Wang Jiuliang, director of the 2011 documentary Beijing Besieged By Waste’s documentation of the endless landfills that surround Beijing is so extensive, so deliberately mapped, the film brings eye-opening authenticity to China’s pollution crisis.

Ultimately, the story surrounding the undoing of Mike Daisey is less about his dishonesty than about what Americans expect from reporting on China and the hazards that spring from those expectations, where lies become more palatable than facts.

Huang Weikai's Disorder will screen April 3rd

Presented as part of the Maysles Cinema’s Street Views series curated by Paul Dallas and Anthony Titus, Disorder will screen at 7:30pm and will be preceded by a short film, Incident by a Bank (dir. Ruben Ostlund, Sweden, 2009). $10.00 suggested donation.

Following the screening will be a Q&A with Cathryn Dwyre and Chris Perry (Pneumastudio), moderated by Paul Dallas, and an opening night reception.

More information about Maysles Cinema and how to get there can be found here.

More information about Disorder can be found here.

"Crime and Punishment" (dir. Zhao Liang)

The bleak stretch of border between Northeast China and North Korea is known as a particularly punishing zone, both politically and geographically. In Zhao Liang‘s film Crime and Punishment, the police culture of this pocket of the world is explored to mesmerizing, sometimes mortifying, effect. Portrayed unflinchingly in Zhao’s gaze is the extreme precision of rules the cops aim to attain, the chaotic confusion of almost-crimes and inexplicable legal proceedings; the world occupied by these police and those closely-watched citizens whose encounters with the “law” are rarely short of brutal. Bribery and false accusations abound and a sense of paranoia pervades the film, a sense of oppression that eats away at both the so-called cops and robbers. In the range of these police assaults, the distinction between public and private life falls away and mahjong games and quiet living rooms are ready targets.

The 2007 film focuses on the internal workings of the police community, but the reality that over the river and through the woods from this Chinese border town is another regime is never far off. Recently, a development of an ambiguous political and moral structure in this part of the world was reported on by Agence France Presse. Stymieing any kind of underground railroad-type system that might exist in Northeast China to aid refugees escaping North Korea, officials have installed silent alarms in the homes of local Chinese, meant to exist as warning signals against North Koreans seeking sanctuary in Chinese homes. “If you push the red button on the wall, a signal goes directly to a police station,” [South Korean news agency] Yonhap quoted one man as saying.

The sinister underpinnings of the alarm system are troubling at best and, given the police climate in such towns, presents an unsettling reality of surveillance and control. The alarms, which represent part of a larger initiatives for Beijing to reign in North Korean border-crossers, have seemingly further eradicated the line between government policy and private life and made informants of ordinary citizens.  For North Korean refugees turned over the police, their fate may be desperate. AFP reports, “Amnesty says returnees are sent to labour camps where they are subject to torture.”