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.

"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.

Relevant Classroom Use

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.

Relevant Classroom Use

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.

Relevant Classroom Use

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.

Relevant Classroom Use