"Disorder" (dir. Huang Weikai)

Sight and Sound‘s annual account of the year’s cinematic highlights featured two dGenerate titles, spotlighting some of the brightest and boldest Chinese indies in recent memory.

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum selected Huang Weikai‘s Disorder as one of his most memorable cinematic experiences of the past year, praising the film as a “Guangzhou city symphony culled from street footage by many hands and a major example of recent Chinese independent cinema.” 

Wang Jiuliang‘s Beijing Besieged By Waste appeared on the list of critic Sukhdev Sandhu, who called the film “eerie and urgent.” Sandhu goes on to address “One image – of the splayed yet oddly restful corpse of a man who had assembled a tiny shack amidst an enormous wasteland – has haunted me like no other in 2011.” 

"Fujian Blue" (dir. Weng Shuoming)

dGenerate Films is pleased to announce that Robin Weng Shuoming‘s Fujian Blue will be available to rent for all Comacast Cable on-demand subscribers during the month of January.

Fujian Blue is a thrilling narrative portrayal of reckless youth, corruption, and heartache in of southern China’s most telling social environments.

A full review by Mike Fu can be found here:

“Subtropical reveries of money, sex, and power dominate the golden triangle of southern China in this gritty neorealist drama from Robin Weng (Weng Shouming).  Featuring idyllic natural landscapes side by side with Fujian province’s urban sprawl, Weng’s narrative follows a group of young hoodlums circulating carefree in a vapid nightlife of karaoke bars and dance halls.  By day, they pursue a more malicious endeavor to extort money from local housewives, whose husbands have made their fortunes abroad and left them floundering at home.  The film opens contrasting rows of decrepit houses with breathtaking mansions, reminiscent of a southern Californian suburb, glistening beneath the sun.  Already the dichotomy of contemporary Chinese society becomes apparent: the rift between haves and have-nots threatens to grow ever wider, and the stakes only become higher for a younger generation willing to risk everything.”

Wang Jiuliang focuses his camera in a Beijing landfill

A recent article in the Global Times addresses the sprawling landfills surrounding Beijing that inspired Wang Jiuliang‘s documentary Beijing Besieged By Waste.

Feng Shu reports:

Wang spent months tracking garbage trucks to hundreds of the city’s legal landfill sites, illegal garbage dumps and recycling centers. He took more than 10,000 photographs and shot more than 60 hours of video.

Wang’s original idea was to discuss the environmental hazard of over-consumption. He focused on garbage as the “evidence” and decided it was time to ring the alarm.

“Few people know just how much garbage there is in this city, all of these photos and videos I shot show just how urgent this matter is,” said Wang…

Wang’s film, steeped in the hopeless expanse of Beijing’s waste situation, minces no meaning in showing the truth behind Beijing’s least sustainable landscapes.

Wang’s video essay of Beijing’s garbage dumps suggests there are more than 1,000 illegal landfills, where an army of garbage pickers scour the waste for anything that can be recycled for cash. The unlicensed illegal sites take no precautions to protect the environment before going into business or during their operation, said Wang.

Wang used satellite images from Google Earth to look for telltale signs of landfill sites. He also used less high tech sleuthing methods; he simply followed garbage trucks to the final destinations.

“If the trucks led to a place where I could see lots of black smoke and many crows, then I was sure there must be a landfill,” said Wang.

Wang’s activism and Beijing Besieged were also the topic of a recent Beijing Today article by He Jianwei, which describes the landfills surrounding Beijing—a city categorized by geographic division into concentric “ring roads”—as the city’s “Seventh Ring.”

The "Seventh Ring": Wang's Google Map findings

With air quality in Beijing at an all-time low, concerns being raised over the breakneck pace of auto sales in China, and a garbage problem that is raging out of control, Wang’s message is resonating loud and clear.

Again, the Global Times reports:

“I never knew there are so much garbage to take care of and how close it is to us. Nothing is more important than raising people’s awareness and to help push the government to make changes,” said Wang.

 

"Enter the Clowns" (dir. Cui Zi'en)

Michael Gold of the China Global Times spoke recently with Karin Chien on dGenerate Films‘s contribution to the promotion and distribution of Chinese independent cinema. The article, Cinema dConstructed, speaks to dGenerate’s beginnings and mission to further the reach and expand the distribution horizons of compelling, entertaining Chinese films:

According to Chien, who worked for years as a producer of independent films unrelated to China before founding dGenerate in 2008, the films she encountered spoke to her in particular as an American of Chinese ancestry who possessed little China experience.

“It was also so difficult to find an unmediated view of China in the States,” she said. “You’d have a movie like Mardi Gras: Made in China [a documentary about cultural and economic globalization, following the life-cycle of Mardi Gras beads from a factory in Fuzhou to a carnival in New Orleans] that, while interesting, imparted a very Western, reductive, not-so-complex view of what China is.”

Gold further addresses the distribution treatment and aesthetic content of such dGenerate titles as Liu Jiayin‘s Oxhide, Cui Zi’en‘s Enter the Clowns, and Huang Weikai‘s Disorder:

This disparity between the China presented to Western viewers and the reality on the ground compelled Chien to seek out a vision of China as represented by such intimate, probing portraits as Liu Jiayin‘s Oxhide and Cui Zi’en‘s Enter the Clowns, both films made on shoestring budgets, without distribution channels and wholly removed from the restrictive studio system – in essence, the definition of a Chinese independent film.

“For any movie, you basically have three avenues of distribution: theatrical, semi-theatrical and non-theatrical,” she explained. “Theatrical is almost always a losing proposition, and now with DVD sales slipping, no one is making money from a standard release anymore.”

The other two realms are where the lion’s share of opportunity for dGenerate’s catalogue lie, in more modest, community-based venues as cinematheques and museums, bars and lounges, and, particularly, in the surprisingly vast academic market.

But despite this distributional slant toward a more scholastic milieu, Chien said that her first and foremost concern is finding films that will entertain, rather than purely educate or impart a social or political message.

“Our films coming from China are immediately positioned in a certain way, in a political context,” she said. “But we’re not looking for movies that can ‘tell’ you something about China – if you learn something from our movies, that’s great, but our main concern is aesthetic value.”

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

Beijing Besieged by Waste received the Bronze Award in the Top Environmental Documentary category (sponsored by The Nature Conservatory or TNC) at the 1^st iSunTV Chinese Documentary Awards. (See link)

Recently, the film also received the Anthropology and Sustainable Development Prize (sponsored by SITA of Suez Environnement) at the 30^th International Jean Rouch Festival (Nov. 5 – 27, 2011).

Congratulations to director Wang Jiuliang on the success of his film.

Beijing Besieged by Waste is available as part of the dGenerate Films catalog.

"No. 89 Shimen Road" director Shu Haolun

Congratulations to writer-director Shu Haolun, whose new film No. 89 Shimen Road just won the Best Asian Film Award (NETPAC Award) from 27th Warsaw International Film Festival.

In giving the award to Shu, the NETPAC jury commented on their decision:

The 27th WFF NETPAC Jury gives out the award to a film that poignantly depicts the struggle of a country confronted with a new order. It is also a personal and touching view of a world that no longer exist.

No. 89 Shimen Road is available through dGenerate Films. It will screen in Chicago next month as part of an 11-film series on Chinese independent cinema hosted by Doc Films.

Shu’s previous films Struggle and Nostalgia are also available through dGenerate.

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Mr. Zhao’s evolution from a filmmaker hounded by the government to one whom it celebrates offers a window into hard choices that face directors as they try to carve out space for self-expression in China’s authoritarian system. Like Mr. Zhao, many seek to balance their independent visions with their desires to live securely and win recognition.

Accompanying the article are two videos: one in which Zhao shares his thoughts on filmmaking in China, and another in which Ai Weiwei confronts Zhao on camera over the withdrawal of his film Petition from the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival in order to avoid political controversy.

dGenerate Films is the distributor of Zhao’s film Crime and Punishment. It can be purchased through dGenerate or Amazon, or viewed online at Amazon or Fandor.

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Ghost Town (Fei Cheng)
directed by Zhao Dayong
Tucked away in a rugged corner of Southwest China, a village is haunted by traces of China’s cultural past while its residents piece together a day-by-day existence.

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Shelly Kraicer

The Cinema Pacific Film Festival’s special series of Chinese cinema opens today and runs until April 10 at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Full screening details can be found here. dGenerate titles Disorder, 1428 and Oxhide II are featured in the program, with Oxhide II director Liu Jiayin appearing in person.

We caught up with Shelly Kraicer, Cinema Pacific’s first Festival Fellow, who curated the program, to get his thoughts on the series and the films he selected.

dGF: There are dozens if not hundreds of great Chinese independent films made in the past several years. How did you decide on the films for this program? What did you want to convey about Chinese independent film through your selections?

SK: I wanted to pick films that represented a range of different kinds of filmmaking that independent Chinese artists are doing now: experimental fiction, experimental documentary, on-the-spot documentary (jishi jilupian) and something unique from recent fiction film. Liu Jiayin is the most exciting young exponent of something like experimental-narrative-documentary-style hybrid filmmaking, now, so her two Oxhide films will already cover almost the entire range of films I was looking for. They’re challenging, and they’re fun, and they are very important.

As luck would have it, Ms Liu will be in the USA this week, so she can come join us to present her films at the University of Oregon and meet the audiences there. Zhu Wen will also be in North America at the same time, so it was natural to pick his brilliant new feature Thomas Mao to give audiences Chinese independent fiction that’s playful and brilliant, avant garde and entertainingly comic. That’s a rare combination in Chinese indie filmmaking today, which tends to the more earnest end of the tonal spectrum.

dGF: You’ll be personally introducing two independent documentaries, 1428 and Disorder. What do these films in particular tell us about the independent documentary scene in China today?

SK: 1428 is a fine recent exponent of the on-the-spot documentary. Starting after 1989 and continuing to today, Chinese independent documentary makers, following Frederick Wiseman, Shinsuke Ogawa, and cinema verite principles, and in distinct opposition to the mainstream Chinese ideological official documentary form, shoot on DV, on-the-scene, and eschew voice over and music. Du Haibin is an exemplary practitioner of this mode of documentary realism. Disorder comes from a completely different point on the documentary practice spectrum, and is made by former avant-garde visual artist Huang Weikai. It’s city symphony-like collage of frantic urban chaos tells its own stories, implicitly, through speed and texture and unbridled energy.

dGF: Two fiction filmmakers, Liu Jiayin and Zhu Wen, will be on hand to present their work. What do appreciate the most about these two directors?

SK: I’ve suggested above that it’s their fluency with humour that I admire most, in an experimental film art context. Liu Jiayin is a rigorous narrative structuralist, but her family dramas are always wryly funny. And Zhu Wen remakes himself with each of his three films: Thomas Mao counterpoints Zhuangzi’s Daoist philosophical ontology with wacky cross-cultural gags. I can’t think of anything more appropriate to the spirit of Zhuangzi, actually.

dGF: The festival is also including a series of films by Feng Xiaogang, who in some ways couldn’t be further on the opposite end from the independent filmmakers along the spectrum of Chinese cinema. He’s commonly known as China’s most commercially successful filmmaker. Setting aside his films’ phenomenal box office success, what do you think is most interesting about them?

SK: That would take an essay on its own to explain (which I do plan to write, eventually…). There’s a strain of subversive linguistic rebellion in Feng Xiaogang, a smart, satirical, ironic acid-laced undercurrent, that’s there even in his most commercially glossy productions. This is the Wang Shuo side of director Feng (who did in fact star in Wang Shuo’s only movie, Baba, 1996), and it prevents his blockbusters from being simply written off as complacent status quo-comforting monsters.

dGF: Finally, University of Oregon will hold s a two week course on Chinese Independent Cinema that you will be co-teaching with Professor David Li and is related to the screening series. What are the most important things you want your students to take away from such a short, intensive program?

SK: If they could come away with some of their preconceptions about China and Chinese cinema challenged, if they get a sense of the range and complexity that Chinese current independent cinema contains, and if this lets them start asking different kinds of questions about China, film art, and Chinese movies, then I’ll feel that our work together was useful.

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By Kevin B. Lee

Karamay (dir. Xu Xin)

Xu Xin’s devastating epic documentary Karamay is set to make its San Francisco premiere this Sunday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. (Details here).  In advance of the screening, I looked back at footage from a discussion held after the film’s New York premiere at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight last month, with director Xu Xin and producer Zhu Rikun both present. Going into the event, I wondered how a local U.S. audience would respond to a six-hour Chinese documentary, and I was especially curious to see how many would stick around for a Q&A session. By the end of the epic screening, a couple dozen people remained in the audience, and from their words they were clearly moved. In fact, the session was not so much dominated by questions and answers as by a series of intense and highly thoughtful responses from several audience members.

It was particularly interesting to hear the reactions of young overseas Chinese students who watched the film, given the film’s critical subject matter as well as past reports of disturbances at Chinese film screenings caused by nationalistic audience members highly sensitive to unflattering depictions of their homeland. (For a vivid example see Jia Zhangke’s first hand accounts of his recent festival experiences.) In the case of this screening, some Chinese audience members expressed a complex and highly personal response to Xu’s film. One viewer remarked how the film maintains a critical view of Chinese society without catering to Western stereotypes:

“What sets your film apart from other Chinese independent films circulating in the international market is that it does not simply fit into a simplified humanistic or humanitarian rhetoric that most Western viewers impose on China’s situation. We tend to demonize China as such, that their educational system brainwashes people and everyone in China just sits there following the rules without any sense of agency over the experience of their own lives. The very structure of your film, especially the beginning shots that take so long with the close ups of each child, and the six hour length of your film, actually demands the viewer to approach China and contemporary Chinese politics and rethink from a critical point of view, not from a simple humanitarian rhetoric of the West. That’s what I think is the most productive part of your film and I appreciate it.”

Another young viewer had an even more personalized response:

“I’m originally from China and I study graduate school at Columbia. I did my undergraduate study at Nanjing University. It’s the school that the girl at the end of the film [who was severely crippled by the Karamay fire] says she hoped to attend, but she can’t anymore. I’m the same age as her, so I imagined if that tragedy hadn’t happened to her, we could have been classmates, even friends.  It felt so close to me.

When I looked at the introduction [of the film] at the website and saw that it was six hours, I wondered why was it so long? I thought maybe the director meant to show the sorrow and grief of each parent. But then when I saw the film I got the idea that it’s deeper, it’s beyond that.

One interesting thing I noticed is that when we imagine a film of such a disaster, we imagine that those people who suffered must be poor and helpless and powerless. But then I realized that the parents are middle class, they have nice homes with nice decorations. They are not poor; some of them are probably managers or engineers. Those middle class people in any country are the most tame and mild people. Poor people might rebel, high class people might get power, but the middle class don’t. And here you can see how traditional they are. Even though they suffered from that tragedy, they still try to think for the party, for the country. Like my parents, when I’m home, and I criticize the party, my father tells me to shut up and just be thankful that we live such great lives.

But when I listen to [the parents in Karamay] talk, it’s such a big contrast. They are so wise, they’re so smart. My parents wouldn’t ask those questions. It’s like after that tragedy, these people’s eyes have been opened. They used to live on a track day by day. They wouldn’t ask any questions. And then after that day, I think that those things appear in their minds, they started to realize what system are we under, what things should we ask for, and what do we get? How helpless, how small and how weak are we?

And I think about my father. I think if these kinds of things happened to me, my father would definitely change, and become like them. Actually the shifting is very easy. If this thing never happened, they would stay the way my father is. So after watching the film, the question that came to me: how can we change people? How can we make them start to think and realize things? We can’t just start another fire. What else can we do?”

Director Xu Xin at the MOMA screening of Karamay

Other audience members were fascinated with how Xu Xin was even able to make such a film, interviewing dozens of families who had lost children in the disastrous 1994 Karamay fire that killed nearly 300 schoolchildren who were forced to wait while government officials were evacuated first from a burning theatre. Xu Xin offered some insight into how he conducted his shooting and what ramifications the film has on his social standing in China:

“Most of the interviews took place in the subjects’ homes. But some people chose not to be interviewed in their home out of concern for their children. So I rented a place from one of the parents and invited all of those people who did not want to be interviewed in their homes.

There are 22 families in this documentary. In fact, the number of victims is much larger. They all talked a lot for this project. The shortest interview lasted just one day, but most of them lasted 3 or 4 days. I think the reason why they were able to talk so much was because of the time they had with all their pent up emotions. So when someone took the proactive role to go to them and give them the chance to talk, they would pour out everything they wanted to say. The second thing that they were able to talk to the camera so much was because I went there in secret. Nobody knew about my shooting, so they probably felt safe.

As you’ve seen from the movie, this place is owned by China’s national petroleum corporation. The people you’ve seen interviewed in the film are not that that remotely connected to each other because they all are connected to the corporation in some way. They are all considered upper middle class in China in terms of their salary. That’s why the settings of their living rooms look similar.

There are Chinese independent filmmakers who have been caught and imprisoned from making documentaries about sensitive political issues. From this film I’ve been able to avoid these problems, perhaps due to how the parents phrase themselves. All in all, this is a film about the fire. It’s not a political incident.”*

Producer Zhu Rikun added his own take on the issue of censorship for independent documentary filmmakers in China:

Producer Zhu Rikun addresses the audience as moderator Chi-hui Yang and translator Isabella Tianzi Cai look on

“For independent productions censorship is not a big obstacle getting in the way of getting the films shown. The world is getting more transparent and open and is facilitating world distribution. Compared to other kinds of political activities, independent filmmaking is not as risky. We don’t face as much pressure and obstacles as they do. For example, lawyers or other people who may get caught by the police and placed in prison. That’s not typically faced by documentary filmmakers. The responsibility rests on the filmmakers themselves concerning self-censorship. Most people think it’s very hard for independent filmmakers. It’s because there are not so many of them out there. If the number is big then the problem would become smaller.  I think this film is made not just for Chinese audiences, it’s made for everyone because the world is getting smaller. This problem does not just concern Chinese people, it’s a universal problem. It’s more important that we think about what the film is about rather than who the film is made for.”*

However, since Zhu Rikun made these comments in February, new obstacles have emerged for independent filmmaking in China, as several websites related to independent film have been shut down, such as the websites for Fanhall Films, the Li Xianting Film Fund and Yunnan Film Festival. It remains to be seen what ongoing ramifications the current communications crackdown in China will have on independent filmmakers – but we can assume that, true to the title of the Yerba Buena series, they will remain fearless.

*Q&A translation by Isabella Tianzi Cai

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