Just having a party: This year's Beijing International Film Festival had to take a more casual tone. (photo: ArtInfo)

I’m often asked how it is that I keep track of new Chinese independent films. One answer: just be in China for a few weeks in October and November. The film festival season here is packed right now. Two major indie film festivals have just concluded: the 6th Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF, in the Beijing exurb of Songzhuang) and the 8th China Independent Film Festival (in Nanjing). In Beijing itself, we’ve had the 4th First Film Festival (an international festival for films by first-time directors) at various campuses in China including Peking University, and the 6th Chinese Young Generation Film Forum. Coming up is the 5th Chongqing Independent Film and Video Festival (CIFVF).

That’s a lot of films and festivals. Of course there is substantial overlap, especially between the three main indie film festivals (BIFF, CIFF, CIFVF). BIFF and CIFF each had its own issues this year: external and internal conflict that showed just how much pressure independent filmmakers are under in China at the moment. These conflicts, which I’ll describe below, also demonstrated the urgency with which these filmmakers conceive of their practice, their autonomy, their mission, and their very existence.

The Beijing Independent Film Festival’s (15-22 October 2011) opening night adventures have already been reported here and in a few English language media outlets. I think it’s worth going into some detail here to set the record straight: several of the published accounts got some key details wrong, and it’s important to be precise.

The organizers of the BIFF, the Li Xianting Film Fund, spent the weeks before the festival searching for a workable venue. An increasingly tough regime of political control here in China – concurrent with events such as Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize and the Arab Spring revolts, and non-events like the so-called “Jasmine Revolution” — has severely restricted the space available for non-official public organized activities. The venues BIFF used in the past, the independent Fanhall theatre complex and Songzhuang Art Museum, were this time both off limits, due to pressure from local government officials. A week before BIFF was to start, it looked like the organizers arrived at a clever solution: to go just outside the Beijing Municipality limits to an international hotel complex in Yanjiao, Hebei province (effectively still the Beijing exurbs, but outside of the purview of the Beijing government). But that was also cancelled by the local government there, according to the organizers.

The provocative poster image of the 6th Beijing Independent Film Festival

So, back to Songzhuang. In three days, the interior of the Li Xianting Film Fund headquarters, a small, charming courtyard complex, was completely remodeled into two screening rooms; offices were shunted into side buildings. The new screening spaces were modest in size but superbly equipped, with the highest quality projectors, sound, and computer-driven projection available.

So the opening night show did happen at Film Fund – that is until the cops showed up just at the conclusion of the opening ceremonies, before the screening of the opening film, Lee Yong’s Embracing Not Sleep. This led to more delays, with lots of negotiation, until the proceedings resumed, this time unofficially re-branded as a series of “private screenings” in exactly the same space. The opening film, which detailed, in fairly direct fashion, an erotic triangle between two male miners and the mistress of their exploitive boss, was not screened until the closing day of BIFF. The next two screenings scheduled for opening night did go ahead, but were delayed in the middle. This was a bit farcical: advance word of the cops return was received, whereupon the screenings stopped and the audiences trooped out to the open air courtyard where a spontaneous “party” was created, with lots of beer, roast lamb, and singing, all for show. The cops looked around, saw a party and left, and the screenings resumed.

I don’t want to make light of the official interruption of BIFF. This is the first time I’ve experienced something like this (though police raids on indie Chinese cinema events such as the first two editions of the Beijing Queer Film Festival are well documented). And there were serious consequences: the door to the Li Xianting compound was locked for a couple of days, to preserve the appearance of private screenings (all you had to do was knock to get in, though); press and publicity activities were severely curtailed. This had a definite effect on the size and makeup of the audience who did show. A black unmarked gongbao (Security Police) car parked just outside on the lane, maintaining a kind of lazy quasi-surveillance presence (a plainclothed secret police guy would leave for lunches and dinners, and sometimes chatted amiably enough with BIFF’s manager, who checked up on him each day). But after a few days the door was unlocked again, the car eventually left, and things continued undisturbed.

If this year’s BIFF was compelled to sacrifice audience size and broader public access (each room held at most 50 people, though more could be jammed in for particularly “hot” screenings), it didn’t sacrifice its program. Every film scheduled to be screened was shown, including controversial works like Wang Bing’s The Ditch, a fiction film about so-called rightists who were starved to death in Maoist labor camps in the early 1960s (this drew an absolutely packed house, and occasioned a very heated debate between audience members and Wang Bing himself, who came to defend his first work of fiction that night).

The degree of interference and surveillance was dependent on which level of government and police agency was involved. Local Songzhuang cops, apparently quite respectful of Li Xianting, stayed on that first evening but didn’t get involved (they drank a lot of beer in the courtyard while SMSing their superiors that all was well). The uniformed policemen from the raid took people’s names, because that was the bureaucratic thing to do. Gongbao (the secret police) watched from a distance. A district government cultural cadre did his pathetic best to fill the role of an official bully, yelling at the audiences (“What are you doing here?” “Everyone disperse!”) to no apparent effect. The overall result was to let the organizers and attendees feel a certain limited pressure. “We can make things difficult for you (but we’re not going to go as far as to shut you down)” was the mixed message most of us picked up.

One notable and very exciting new piece of infrastructure (though its construction was not related to BIFF’s last minute location scramble) is the Film Fund’s new digital film archive. Under the Fund’s manager Zhang Qi, substantial resources have been expended to design and equip this brilliant new resource on independent Chinese cinema. One can visit the Fund’s headquarters, sit at one of six newly equipped viewing stations and watch films streaming from their server. Most of this year’s BIFF films were available, with English subtitles; so are many films from past editions of BIFF and other works collected at the archive. Additional bilingual information is also available about the films and filmmakers. This works brilliantly as a festival video centre, and is also available for researchers who visit Songzhuang.

The story continues with the next installment: the China Independent Film Festival from Nanjing, where controversy emerged from within, rather than being imposed from the outside.

Relevant Classroom Use

Police inspect illegal cooking oil, better known as 'drainage oil', seized during a crackdown in Beijing (Photo: AFP/GETTY)

Part of the documentary film series Visions of a New China at the Asia Society

Beijing Besieged by Waste
Dir. WANG Jiuliang
2011. China. 72 min. Digibeta. English subtitles.

October 29, 2011 – 3:00pm – 4:20pm
New York
725 Park Avenue, New York, NY
$7 members; $9 students/seniors; $11 nonmembers (Series discount available. Click on series link for more information.)

———-

Recycled cooking oil is known as “di gou you” or “gan shui you” in Mandarin Chinese and has been translated into “gutter oil”,”sewage oil”, or “drainage oil” in English. It first appeared in the Chinese vocabulary roughly a decade ago, when unlicensed production began to exist. This inferior form of cooking oil contains carcinogens such as aflatoxins; it is both unhygienic and unsafe for consumption.

China uses a massive amount of cooking oil every year. Although official statistics are unavailable on the website of the National Bureau of Statistics, 29.3 million tons of vegetable oil was forecast as the total amount of consumption for 2010 to 2011, an almost 9% increase from 26.85 million tons for 2009 to 2010, compared to 22.5 million tons for 2006 to 2007 (Agri Commodity Prices). In 2010, 15% of the total was estimated to go into waste (Xinhua). And out of that amount, 10 – 20% is said to be legally recycled and made into biofuel, while the remaining would likely end up in the hands of underground cooking oil recyclers, who would process it and then sell it back to Chinese restaurants (Telegraph). Because the net profit of such recycled cooking oil was nearly 200% of what it cost, it was an extremely lucrative business (Xinhua).

Concerned with the badly polluted city that he called home, Chinese freelance photojournalist and independent filmmaker Wang Jiuliang began an investigation of all of the landfill sites in Beijing in October 2008. His project lasted two years, during which time he also came into direct contact with some cooking oil recyclers on the outskirts of Beijing and captured them on camera. Responsibly speaking, Beijing’s pollution and its attendant problems were indeed bigger and deeper than they seemed. Now his documentary Beijing Besieged by Waste (2010) on the investigation has been completed. It was screened for the Foreign Correspondents Club in China on October 13, 2011 at the Embassy of Poland in Beijing. It was on the China Next (CNEX) Campus Tour in Canada last month. It screened once at Beijing’s art house movie theater, Broadway Cinematheque MOMA (BC MOMA). And as of right now, it is playing at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (Oct 13-22).

Below are some of my thoughts on the film and information that I have gathered about it.

Wang Jiuliang is from Anqiu, Shandong. Though he had had a background in painting and photography before he entered college, his more serious studies of photography did not start until he finally transferred to the School of Film and Television Art of Communication University of China at the age of 26. There, he pursued a bachelor’s degree in photography and graduated in 2007. Since then, he has been working as a freelance photographer, using his camera to comment on various social problems and cultural absurdities in China. In 2009, he had an exhibition named “Paradise” at the 5th Lianzhou International Photography Festival in Guangdong and received the Gold Award for Outstanding Artist (ArtNet). Last December, he also became the Photographer of the Year at the 2010 Xitek Photography Awards, also called “Our City” in English (Sohu). The juries gave the following comments about him at the awards ceremony:

Wang Jiuliang has used the simplest of photographic images to remind us the ontology of photographs and the disappearance of conscience in society today. He has shown us the triumph of professionalism of independent photographers over their lack of powerful background, especially so in this commercialized world and consumerist culture. He has also shown us independent photographers’ ability to expose various social problems. The young today seem to live in their own worlds; all they do is introspecting and self-pitying. But Wang exhibits the attributes of a true citizen by showing concern over social problems and turning these concerns into actions with the skills he possesses. What he has done signifies the rise of grassroots consciousness in the age of the Internet. (Sohu)

A lot is packed in the comments, but the ideas should be clear – Wang is a socially conscious artist who uses art for grassroots activism.

As mentioned above, Beijing Besieged by Waste (2010) began in October 2008 and was finished in October 2010. During this time, Wang Jiuliang traveled 15,000 kilometers all around in Beijing, visited roughly 500 landfills, and taken 10,000 stills plus 60 hours of raw footage. What sounds like a mammoth project was diligently carried out by Wang step by step. Here is his famous Google Earth picture of Beijing.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/3/25/1269517312165/Google-map-012.jpg

(Source: The Guardian)

For the most part, the documentary is organized chronologically. After the first sequence of a landfill site slowly being engulfed in thick dust and fog after a trash truck arrives, the title card introduces us to Wang’s endeavor. A sequence of images then show us a fast growing and expanding Beijing, and next we get to see the trash collecting station in his apartment complex, which acts as a segue to the real underbelly of the city. From there, the world of trash opens up. Guided by his own narrative throughout the documentary, including how he discovers the true identity of some black stuff, which he also refers to as “black crap,” we embark on this investigative journey with him, and a sense of urgency lingers over the film.

Wang concocts his observations using both stills and moving images, and he sutures them together using different kinds of documentary features. These include Herzog-style voice over narration, interactive dialog that serves as informal interviews, diegetic music (China’s national anthem played at Tiananmen Square), as well as added music soundtracks throughout the documentary.

He appears in the documentary a dozen times too. For instance, one time, he and his assistant cameraman both bend their heads and check the lens of their video camera after some pig fodder seems to have spilled on it. The inclusion of this shot in the documentary is deliberate. Moments like this are meant to remind viewers that not every shot in the documentary is staged. While he and his team could probably search for the best angle to capture a colorful trash mountain or a gloomy trash trench, there are times that they just have to do it guerrilla-style – they dive right in a situation and make the best out of it.

That said, some shots in the documentary are beautiful despite the fact that they are about trash. We do not if someone has actually put it together, but when the wind blows on layers of colorful plastic bags rested on barb wires, they appear both strange and good-looking, and they remind me of Tibetan prayer flags too. Another shot that tracks the smoke coming out of burning trash also looks impressive. It is a full low-angle shot that looks up at the sky, which I want to call a dome shot, of the smoke. If it had lasted longer than ten seconds, I would say it was mesmerizing.

Besides these inanimate objects, Wang makes the documentary fun to look at by including diverse subjects too. There are cows, goats, dogs, and pigs living in this world. There are also happy-playing children and jovial and chatty men and women, in contrast to the majority of quiet and hardworking scavengers who labor in sweat. Some women casually ask Wang not to film them because they do not look nice picking trash. Wang probably disagrees with that. He still shows them in the final film and allows their voices to be heard. As a matter of fact, seldom would they be heard.

Many good contrast scenes also exist in the documentary. Nights contrast with days; shiny police cars contrast with dirty dumpsters; wedding couples contrast with ragged trash scavengers, etc.

A couple of times, the documentary also tries to seep into our psyche as if it has a spirit. This often occurs when Wang speaks to us in an intimate, down-to-earth, and honest tone. To list a few quotes from him:

“But what confuses me is that we spend so much on transporting water from the Yangtze River thousands of miles away, but do not cherish the water right around us.”

“At first I did not know what the black stuff was. I just noticed the penetrating smell. I had no idea where it came from either. I asked the scavengers nearby, but they were not willing to answer me.”

“Where does the monthly sewage treatment fee we pay go? Who can answer me?. . . This makes me very angry.”

“I do not want to bring any harm to anyone because of my shooting, but sometimes it can be a dilemma. Especially to the scavengers, I always pay my full respect to them.”

“It was a real home, meant so much to him.”

Viewers can easily relate to Wang in these places because he tells his reactions plainly. He is not being hypocritical; he just observes like we will and he reacts.

We do not know if Chinese government officials have had the chance to watch Beijing Besieged by Waste (2010) in China, but it seems that they have appreciated citizenry concerns and actions over environmental problems in Beijing. Wang’s photography exhibition of this project was held last April, and it received considerable recognition from within China. It is stated at the end of the documentary that the Beijing municipal government has planned to invest 10 million yuan ($159 million) in treating waste disposal sites in Beijing over the next five to seven years. Certainly, Wang Jiuliang has done his part to raise awareness on this issue. The next round of actions must be carried out by the government.

Relevant Classroom Use

Participating filmmakers at the 2nd Annual Beijing New Youth Film Festival (photo: Genevieve Carmel)

The 2^nd annual Beijing New Youth Film Festival was held from September 9-18. Organized by the Trainspotting Culture Salon, this young festival makes space for new directors to showcase their work, connect with more experienced filmmakers, and receive feedback from peers and critics. Screenings and discussions were held at CNEX, Trainspotting, and the Wenjin International Art Center at Tsinghua University. The jury included a diverse team of authors, creators, and art critics, in addition to Fifth Generation filmmaker Lv Yue, who was the director of photography for works including Zhang Yimou’s To Live and Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock.

The festival was divided into three program sections: An invitational section featuring new work by distinguished directors, a competition section for new directors, and an Austrian section, programmed by the Austro Sino Arts Program. The opening and closing films of the festival were Pema Tseden’s Old Dog and Zhao Liang’s Together, respectively.

This year’s New Youth Image Award was given to the early Li Xianting Film School graduate Zheng Kuo for his second documentary The Cold Winter, which follows the 2009 artist demonstrations against the demolition of art districts surrounding Beijing’s 798 art zone. The New Youth Image Award was also bestowed on painter-turned-filmmaker Tao Huaqiao for his partly dramatized documentary Luohan, about gang culture in his Jiangxi Province hometown. The animated film Piercing Me by Liu Jian and the documentary Mirror of Emptiness by Ma Li received Distinguished Technical Awards. Mirror of Emptiness, about a Buddhist monastery on the Tibetan Plateau, also won the Special Jury Award. Finally, Deng Bochao’s documentary Under the Split Light, about the disappearance and preservation of Hakka cultural traditions on Hainan Island, received the Humanitarian Award.

The following is a full list of films screened at the festival:

Annual Invitational Section

OLD DOG (2011), Pema Tseden

GAS (2010), Lin Xin

5+5 (2011), Xu Xing and Andrea Cavazzuti

SHATTERED (2011), Xu Tong

POETRY AND DISEASE (2010), Geng Jun

WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS(2011), Ji Dan

A MONK’S TEMPLE (2010), Shen Shaomin

LAST CHESTNUTS(2010), Zhao Ye

MY MOTHER’S RHAPSODY  (2011), Qiu Jiongjiong

TOGETHER (2010), Zhao Liang

New Youth Competition Section

OLD DONKEY (2010), Li Ruijun

LUOHAN (2009), Tao Huaqiao

CHINESE CLOSET (2010), Fan Popo

THE COLD WINTER (2011), Zheng Kuo

UNDER THE SPLIT LIGHT (2010), Deng Bocha

APUDA (2010), He Yuan

EIGHT-INGREDIENT PORRIDGE (2010), Li Dong

THE DAYS (2010), Wei Xiaobo

MIRROR OF EMPTINESS (2010), Ma Li

LOST WALL (2010), Pan Zhiqi

MANGO (2011), Xu Zhipeng

STARVING VILLAGE (2011), Zou Xueping

SATIATED VILLAGE (2011), Zou Xueping

STRAY HOME (2011), Bai Zhiqiang

PIERCING ME (2009), Liu Jian

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH THREE WOMEN (2010), Zhang Mengqi

WANG LIANG’S IDEAL (2010), Gao Xiongjie

Austrian Section

INSIDE AMERICA (2010), Barbara Eder

OCEANUL MARE (2009), Katharina Copony

KAFKANISTAN (2007), Lukas Birk

FOLLOW ME (2010), Johannes Hammel

SOCIALISM FAILED, CAPITALISM IS BANKRUPT. WHAT COMES NEXT? (2010), Oliver Ressle

A DAY IN THE FACTORY (2010), Nico Mesterharm

EVERY SEVENTH PERSON (2006), Ina Ivanceau and Elke Groen

OUR DAILY BREAD (2005), Nikolaus Geyrhalter

CORE OF FLOCK (2009), Barbara Husa

ABENDLAND (2011), Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Relevant Classroom Use

The Olympic Stadium in Beijing, designed by Ai Weiwei in the city he now calls "a nightmare"

In his essay posted on The Daily Beast on August 28, 2010, artist Ai Weiwei rants about Beijing being a nightmarish city for anyone to live in. He says that the rapid economic progress of China has ironically made its capital unrecognizable and its people identity-less, and the country’s political rigidity has only worsened these problems.

In a depressing overview of the people living in Beijing, Ai sorts them into one of the two categories. One, he says, are the money-grabbers and power-worshippers who are distressingly predictable. “You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind.” Frustrated, he goes on. “No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.” The other category, which refers to the mass middle to low wage earners in the city, sounds just as pitiful. “I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope,” Ai observes.
The hopelessness that Ai tries to describe has a particular dimension. Working like dogs and making little money certainly could deject people, but the essay makes a turn as Ai brings up the issue of trust between the Chinese people and the Chinese government, which is known to be one of the biggest culprit behind China’s low Gross National Happiness index. In his own words, “[the] worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system.” This sense of mistrust chisels away people’s happiness whenever they find a need for justice. And that happens almost everyday in Beijing, as some films in our catalog can attest to.

Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, for example, zooms in on a common Beijinger’s struggle with the government about the demolition of his house for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Cui Zi’en’s We Are the . . . of Communism, documents the capricious providence of education for migrant workers’ children in Beijing. What these two examples share in common is that the basic needs and rights of the common people in Beijing cannot be met, and the mechanism to obtain justice is often unavailable.

And yet, Ai’s portrayal of Beijing as a land of total darkness does not paint a complete picture of the complexity of life in this city of  nearly 25 million people. Liu Jiayin’s Oxhide and Oxhide II are examples of Beijing residents’ preservation of their cultural identity. Although the city of Beijing changes its face almost every day to the point of defiling its rich heritage, inside people’s homes time-honored traditions like dumpling-making continue, testifying to the resilience of their culture. Watching Liu’s intimate, heartfelt family dinner with her parents makes us temporarily forget the unpleasant world outside their home. Moreover, as Liu’s father says in the documentary, each person makes his own dumplings, just as each person has a distinct character. Ai may still believe and argue that the people of Beijing are uniform and predictable, but in the less conspicuous corners of Beijing we see how individual identities as well as non-mainstream group identities secretly flourish. We can count on the dedicated efforts of independent Chinese filmmakers to reveal those worlds to us.

Relevant Classroom Use

Visitors seem dazzled by the might of painterly propaganda in the "90th anniversary of the CCP" painting exhibit.

A major function of the National Museum of China is its definition and display of Chinese history under the Party. This section, somewhat romantically entitled “The Road of Rejuvenation” takes up a major part of NMC’s northern section. I walked through it all, from the Opium War to “China in Space.”

Inside the Grand Hall. If it looks like an elegant version of a terminal, it's because the German architects specialize in airports.

First, we enter a sculptural antichamber. This has got to be one of the weirdest immersive sculptural environments I’ve ever seen. An enormous entrance hall has been clotted with what looks like baked clay (I guess it’s depressingly expensive bronze that preserves the original rough slapdash clay “style” of the sculpture). On the left, scenes of feudal China (somewhat more beguiling than depressing, to my eye). On the right, scenes of modern China under the Leadership of the Party (really bleak and ugly, a lot of it is weirdly blank but one can make out a kindergarten model style mini-HK skyline, a high speed train rushing across the Tibetan plateau, and a fast cosmic ball of something, whirring with lumpy clay energy. In the middle, brutally (or, rather, I should say boldly) cleaving past and future in two is a sleek perforated sculpture, designed like a retro jet age style symbolic representation of what must be the progressive force of the Chinese Communist Party (think 1930s deco aggressively angled car hood ornament the size of a small jet). Suitably ideologically seasoned, I entered the Road of Rejuvenation galleries.

There’s something depressingly old-fashioned and small-scale about all of this. I was expecting, I don’t know, something fresh and imaginative, designed at least to display the currently authoritative version of Chinese history in an impressive or at least rhetorically vigorous way. Perhaps I was expecting to see at least a lavish application of unlimited budget to ideological goals where the stakes were enormous. Apparently making something both new and coherent and politically satisfactory was too hard a task, and the curators of this section fell back on the oldest cliches of Chinese ideological museology.

History in pictures, or by the numbers?

Walls are plastered with enlarged photographs, each accompanied by copious explanatory texts (in Chinese and often in English, which is thoughtful); no progressive historical figure of any importance can be left out, so we often get pictures of meetings, and portraits and lists of everyone who might have been present. Come to think of it, this is exactly the strategy of the two giant propaganda film hits of the last two years, The Founding of A Republic and The Beginning of the Great Revival. And it’s exactly what bogs down the second film, turning it essentially into a power-point display of Chinese Communist hagiography, incidentally turning off audiences, who failed to purchase tickets in Party-mandated droves.

There are artifacts as well, although which ones are authentic and which are replicas is hard to discern (and the labels rarely make distinctions for us, unlike the Ancient China galleries, where replicas are meticulously labelled as such). Sun Yat-sen’s hat, for example, seems to be made of suspiciously new-looking wool, though the black brim looks authentically worn. I was taken with the original plaque for the Beijng Imperial University. At least I think it was the original.

The dark grey walls of the oppressively colonial late Qing era historical display rooms progressively lighten until we reach the mockup of Tiananmen. An explosion of red greets the eye. It’s 1949, and the brightest red walls decorate the upbeat, celebratory exhibits. Here there is lots of technology (machines, or models of machines, are everywhere) and lots of weaponry (attracting the entranced attention of the youngest museum-goers the day I was there). After Liberation, the exhibition space walls become pink (socialist pink?), then fade to clean white, matching the contemporary post-capitalist characterless era of the PRC, celebrated with endless dull photographs of Deng Xiaoping, followed by Jiang Zemin, followed by Hu Jintao. Perhaps I should have counted the photos, for now I wonder if the tallies for these three would have been exactly equal.

Gallery space leading to the Deng Xiaoping era: a gap in history waiting to be filled

I wanted to pay special attention to the displays from around 1966 to 1976, but couldn’t find any. Chairman Mao largely disappears from the photos in the early 60s (there is a lot of Zhou Enlai beaming, welcoming foreign guests, etc.), and then there’s a jump to 1972, which is exclusively about Nixon in China. Nothing happens up on the walls in between. In fact, this hiatus is echoed by a remarkable caesura in the display architecture: we enter a large empty lobby right after the eight photographs from 1972-76.  Nobody’s there, nothing’s on the walls, just a few benches scattered around to sit and contemplate, as we walk down 5 flights of stairs, and then we’re into the Deng Xiaoping era as the galleries resume. Perhaps the building’s architecture just happened to need a lobby here, with an intervening staircase. Perhaps it’s empty space to be filled with something about the currently undepictable Cultural Revolution, when the time comes for the Museum to face that part of Chinese history. In an interesting coincidence, the historical display in the China National Film Museum in Beijing does exactly the same thing between 1966 and 1976: there’s a gap, and empty lobby and a staircase, and then the displays resume.

In other words, Chinese history is a work in progress. Such can be seen throughout the National Museum of China, whose combination of monumentality and contingency, glorious beauty and stolid ideology, mirrors awkwardly, but also quite appropriately, China today.

To retrieve some of the National Museum’s missing history between 1959 and 1976, watch historical documentary filmmaker Hu Jie’s films Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul and Though I Am Gone.

Relevant Classroom Use

The gallery of Ancient Chinese art in the National Museum of China may be the new highlight of anyone's visit to Beijing.

Beijing’s new National Museum of China opened in March 2011. It’s been steadily expanding inside since, opening more and more galleries to the public. Recently, the galleries of ancient art were finally opened, so I decided it was time to make a thorough visit (I’d been once before in early May just to take a look at the building) and see how the Chinese nation choses to present itself in a grand museum setting.

First of all, the setting. It is very grand. Super gigantic-grand. Reports in Western media describe an amusingly direct series of phone calls by planners of the National Museum of China (NMC) to western museum experts. Sample questions: “What is the floor space of the Louvre?” “What about the British Museum in London?” Clearly, the architects’ brief included making this the Largest Museum In The World (to match Beijing Capital Airport’s Terminal 3, the Largest Building In The World; the Great Wall, and so on). Apparently they succeeded, and out of the shell of two older museums on Tiananmen Square, the Museum of Chinese History and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, the National Museum of China is being born, a giant monument to China’s fabled 5000 year history, and as we shall see, to the faithful guardianship of this immense history by the Chinese Communist Party. “Is being born” because the NMC is still a work in progress. Vast swathes of the building are still uninhabited, forthcoming galleries uninstalled. But I would estimate that at least half of the Museum is now open, more than enough for a full day of provocative and sometimes entrancing museum-going.

Newly minted Chinese haute bourgeoisie find a place to see their own aspirations reflected within the Museum.

One enters either in enormous long lines from the main entrance on Tiananmen Square, or without lining up at all from the building’s north side. At first I was told that the North Entrance was a sort of VIP entrance, and on my first visit I managed to talk my way in by appearing stubborn and obtuse and pretending to know no Chinese. At least I thought that was happening. This time, it seems that the only difference between the two entrances is the price of admission. It’s free to enter by the long lines; one pays (a nominal 10 RMB, about $1.50) to skip the line. And that 10 yuan includes admission to the German Enlightenment temporary exhibition (a disappointing assemblage of second rate paintings around one  great Watteau masterpiece, Party in the Open Air, and some characteristically brilliant and chilling Goya prints from his Caprichos and Los Desastres de la Guerra series). Not included is the Louis Vuitton “exhibition” installation-advertisement, which would cost another 10 RMB. I opted to skip paying to see an elaborate showroom for luxury products, though not without wondering what sort of deal LV managed to negotiate with the Chinese museum authorities that allowed them to co-opt four large galleries in the nation’s foremost museum to mount what is essentially a PR show-cum-product exhibition.

This is not unlike, I imagine, renting on-screen time in contemporary Chinese blockbuster films (Feng Xiaogang’s being the most notorious in this respect) for prominent product placement: even the current propaganda would-be blockbuster The Beginning of the Great Revival, in its own way the NMC of contemporary propaganda films, managed to place a rather prominently branded antique Omega wristwatch into its story.

After entering the Museum, I was searched and frisked by airport-style security people, though none of my beep-eliciting and obviously bulky electronics were inspected (photos of the museum that follow are the results of my semi-surreptitious attempt to document my visit for this piece, apologies for the rough quality). Then on into the main hall.

Visitors as ants in a vast cultural space. It doesn't just look like a classy airport terminal; you could fly a small plane in here.

I felt tiny. Most of NMC’s floor space is taken up by an enormous main entrance hall, fronting Tiananmen Square. It’s designed to make you feel minuscule and insignificant (in the face of those 5000 years of history, perhaps?), and it works. What doesn’t work is the gigantic scale of the building: though galleries and a series of balconies (hello Musée d’Orsay) afford vantage points over the hall’s various cavernous wings, you never know quite where you are (and I’m good with maps, and can get you from the Louvre’s Winged Victory of Samothrace to Chirac’s African sculpture court in three minutes flat). Follow the crowds.

Facing the entrance hall is enormous Central Hall Number One, now devoted to a display of gigantic (I’m running out of words for “really big”) historical paintings chosen to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The display was a bit dutiful, paintings crammed in together, hung above each other in study gallery style, around a vast empty middle. The famous revolutionary paintings in the collection of the Museum were somehow missing (I’d seen them years ago in the great Guggenheim show on Chinese art). The whole installation looked a bit perfunctory, as if sending a curatorial message that “we have to do this, but our heart’s really not in it”.

What the curators hearts are into, clearly, is ancient Chinese art, especially from the Neolithic times through the Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties. These galleries, newly opened, are spectacular. Louvre spectacular. British Museum spectacular. Every tourist who’s come to Beijing looking for masterpieces of Chinese ancient art (and told to go to the Shanghai Museum to find them) now has someplace to satisfy his or her art desires. I was in heaven.

Right off the bat, we can admire a neolithic erotic/devotional sculpture, anatomically detailed (it’s hermaphrodite), prominently placed with helpfully explanatory caption. The prudish Chinese curator is extinct, at least at the NMC. You’ve seen Chinese bronzes before, but nothing this spectacular: profusely detailed four animal-headed cauldrons, vats large enough to bathe an entire court. Masterpieces sit in their own beautifully lit cases in the middle of large galleries, and intelligent thematic groupings (family life, economy, transport) as well as smaller works are gathered in cases around the walls.

Ranks of Han dynasty soldiers

But bronzes are just a warm up show. The Museum’s Qin and Han sculpture collection is glorious. The two terracotta warriors from Xi’an seem a bit lonely off with their horse in their heavily protected corner (word is that NMC used its institutional heft to requisition many masterpieces from regional museums all around the country), but facing them, the vast battalion of metre-high Han dynasty pottery warrior statues, arranged in ranks from spear-carriers to cavalrymen, is a spectacular show of art and might. Then there is a Han dynasty sculpture masterpiece gallery that I will keep going back to. It includes the famous laughing drummer curled up on one leg, an ecstatically gesturing female Han dancer, arms describing hyperspace, and a magnificently snarling stone lion.

An arched stone gate from the Northern Wei Dynasty is one of the few architectural installations in the museum, but it’s beautifully detailed, and unprotected (there’s glass around almost everything other than the large scale stone objects). NMC’s other architectural materials take the form of large elaborately detailed wooden models (a temple hall, a pagoda), which seem to be a specialty of Chinese museology, and do in fact attract the close attention of many Chinese museum goers.

The Tang galleries continue to maintain this high level of presentation and display, forgoing the usual multicoloured flamboyant statuary for substantial but less familiar pieces. But there is a surprising and somewhat disconcerting drop off in quality from the Song dynasty on, although there is much to look at and enjoy. I’m not sure why. Is the Ancient Art Department at NMC divided into two sections, pre and post-Song? Perhaps artifacts of the highest level just weren’t available at installation time.

All of these galleries are in the museum’s sub-basement, but lofty ceilings, sumptuous materials, and sophisticated lighting make you forget you’re underground. In a giant upstairs gallery, Central Hall 2, is the NMC’s other pièce-de-résistance, a Buddhist sculpture gallery full of beautifully installed Northern Wei masterpieces, a supremely suave Tang dynasty Bodhisattva, and important Song and Ming sculptures, in wood and stone.

The same can’t be said, unfortunately, for the new Porcelain gallery. I hope this atrociously tacky glass and plastic installation is only temporary. It feels like a jewelry show in a HK emporium designed for mainland tourists’ quick-hit look-and-buy visits. It’s crowded, the works are jumbled in what seems to be (but this can’t be) an order based on colour (beautiful simple monochrome porcelain on the left, blue-and-white in the middle, multicolour on the right). This is just weird, but does concentrate some wonderfully elegant, luminously pale Ming monochromes together, away from their more famous blue and white cousins, who always steal the show. Fortunately, hidden in the appalling display are a decent number of my favourite Qing dynasty Yongzheng period porcelains, of perfect proportion and astonishing refinement (the Yongzheng emperor himself may have been sadistically repressive, but his artists were something else).

Relevant Classroom Use

Demolition Dominates the Residents of Beijing in "Meishi Street"

In China Beat, Jared Hall reports on the spate of public protests that have been prevalent throughout the expansion of the Beijing subway system. Hall focuses on the story of Wang Shibo, whose family shop was slated for demolition to make way for a subway station, at the risk of ruining the family financially:

According to Wang, the family invested practically everything they had to renovate the small clothing shop. But when the subway corporation abruptly presented a notice of eviction, they were reportedly offered just two percent of their investment back in compensation. The very public confrontation with the subway corporation that followed attracted the interest of the international press and a delegation from the National People’s Congress. The shop was torn down two weeks later, but not before an agreement was quietly reached with the family.

Dramatic as the Wang family’s crisis in the face of demolition may be (at one point Wang’s parents doused themselves with gasoline and threatened to burn themselves), it’s a situation that is anything but uncommon in Beijing. In just the past ten years, Hall reports, the Beijing subway system has grown at a staggering pace, from two lines totaling 54 km to 14 lines at 336 km, with another 5 lines on the way.  The subway’s expansion has touched nearly every Beijing neighborhood in the process, though it is only one facet of a decade of ubiquitous urban demolition and renewal, transforming Beijing from a city of modest but distinct hutong alley neighborhoods to large blocks shadowed by expensive high-rise apartments, along with a steep rise in commercial value.

The disparity of value between the old and new buildings has transformed not just Beijing’s landscape but its demographics, with hundreds of thousands of longtime residents no longer able to afford to live in their neighborhoods, or even in the city proper. These citizens seemingly have little power to redress their plight, but according to Hall, one remarkable aspect of the situation is that displaced Beijing residents haven’t been completely helpless in facing the impending loss of their homes:

Their tactics included a combination of petitions and visits to government offices, public demonstrations, as well as lawsuits directed against the subway corporation. This particular repertoire of actions aligns exactly with those described by You-tien Hsing in her discussion of urban households resisting demolition more broadly. Even while operating within the political constraints of the capital, residents’ ability to first draw press coverage and then to extract a commitment from the subway corporation to rectify the problem should warn against dismissing localized resistance to expansion as futile.

One of the first films to thoroughly explore the plight of Beijing residents facing eviction is Meishi Street by Ou Ning. Filmed in the city’s buildup to the 2008 Olympics, the film shows residents fighting endless red tape and official indifference to protest the planned destruction of their homes in order to widen the streets of their neighborhood, located near Tiananmen Square.  Given video cameras by the filmmakers, the residents shoot breathtakingly candid footage of the eviction process.

Relevant Classroom Use

I previously wrote here about the cancellation of the 2011 Beijing Independent Documentary Film Festival (DOChina) at Songzhuang. As a companion piece, let’s take a look at the other important film event scheduled for roughly the same time in Beijing, the First Beijing International Film Festival (Di yi jie Beijing guoji dianying ji), which took place from April 23 to 28, 2011.

The BJIFF Opening Gala was more than spectacular, as far as these things go. An obviously huge budget was expended on large scale staged showpieces, set up for what was reported to be a “live television broadcast” managed by CCTV3, in Beijing’s most spectacular theatre, the Opera Hall of National Center for the Performing Arts just beside the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square.

CCTV news clip Here.

It makes sense that the fledgling BJIFF would shower a large part of its apparently substantial resources on this splashy opening show. The festival seems to be about scale, civic and national power, and about positioning Beijing — institutionally, internationally, industrially, and in the media’s frame of reference — as the centre of China’s visible film culture. That Shanghai has been host to China’s most prominent long-running film fest, in fact the only one with a real international profile, was an impediment to this image Beijing is eager to project. Hence the BJIFF, tasked to reposition in “film festival” terms Beijing as the acknowledged and unrivaled centre of Chinese cinema.

Chairpersons of International Film Festivals Meet in 1st BJIFF (image: Beijing International Film Festival)

This large-scale PR project (for that’s what it is, fundamentally: a state power-driven PR demonstration on a giant scale) necessitates large, splashy, visible, easily media-tized events, with both domestic and international impact. So, actual film screenings, the core of a film festival’s mission, were relegated in the BJIFF to a sort of barely publicized sideshow (during the festival it was impossible to find English-language information on the film schedule, and Chinese language info was incomplete and only available piecemeal online). Decorative festival side bars included an under-populated “film market” and “project market”, and various hard- or impossible-to-get-into directors’ talks and festival seminars.

But a gala opening ceremony, with red carpet, TV coverage, stars, international guests: that was easy to find. “Stars Shining in Beijing” was the official name of the opening ceremony on the evening of April 23rd. I think the result fully fleshed out its rather complex mission statement, which I quote for you from the English official programme guide: “Let us make the Beijing International Film Festival a world-class cultural extravaganza with Chinese characteristics and with a Beijing flavor!”

The Chinese government loves representational galas, high profile stunning propaganda events to symbolize and define its main themes and policies. The 2008 Olympics and 2010 Shanghai World Expo are the largest scale  recent examples. But look also at the way Beijing’s recent star architecture projects — Rem Koolhas’s perpetually-under-construction CCTV headquarters, Stephen Holl’s Lynked Hybrid complex, Zaha Hadid’s Galaxy SOHO –  are somehow supposed to symbolize the progressiveness of Beijing’s new contemporary architecture. In fact, they are islands of stunning design that mask the reality Beijing’s destructively and dispiritingly mediocre new building stock.

Marco Muller (image: Beijing International Film Festival)

So, one can see how the Opening Gala is designed to represent the BJIFF in propaganda, media, and in official tallies of how the government’s money was spent and corresponding prestige purchased. “Beijing Welcomes You”. We were treated to surprisingly short speeches by the Mayor of Beijing Guo Jinlong and the director of SARFT (the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television) Cai Fuchao, and then to a somewhat longer paean to the glories of Beijing and Chinese cinema by Venice International Film Festival Director Marco Müller. Müller with his usual bilingual flair, hit all the appropriate notes when it comes to articulating harmonious official cooperation with China.

Politburo heavyweight and Beijing Communist Party Head Liu Qi gave us an Olympic Games style “I declare the 1st annual BJIFF open”. He is in fact the former President of the Beijing Olympic Games Organizing Committee, which I think serves to clarify the way the 2008 Games and the BJIFF function in parallel kinds of ways.

It is notable that the Opening Gala’s complement of high officials far outranked the deputy mayors and vice-heads of SARFT who annually grace the rival Shanghai International Film Festival’s opening ceremonies. I’ve never seen Politburo members at a film event before. Their presence signals not only the weight that State and Party power is placing behind the BJIFF, but also suggests how closely said State and Party are watching over BJIFF as a core event in China’s projection of its “soft power” around the world.

One of the most distinctive elements of the evening’s proceedings was the parade of foreign film festival heads who marched up to the stage: Venice, Toronto, Pusan, Sundance, Tokyo, Thessaloniki, the list of festival directors goes on and on. These visiting eminences (was anyone reminded of tribute state potentates arriving in Qing dynasty Beijing to make ritual acknowledgement of the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom’s power and prestige?) received flowers from charming plaid-skirted children and the audience’s enthusiastic applause, as their presence seemingly ratified the international standing and importance of BJIFF for local and national audiences.

Then the fun began. A giant dance number attempted to mix actors in full Beijing Opera regalia with some sort of hospital orderly-style white-garbed breakdancing dervishes: evidently an attempt to show the harmonious relationship between Beijing culture then and now.

Star time: BJIFF’s two unexpectedly accurately named “image ambassadors”, Zhang Ziyi and Jackie Chan (both chosen, presumably, as much for their high recognizability factor in non-Chinese entertainment markets as for their status in current Chinese movie culture) arrived onstage for some awkward and surprisingly unrehearsed chit-chat. This was followed by a second large scale dance spectacular whose fantasy representation of Jiangnan (southern) China culture (take that, Shanghai) presumably balanced the “hard” northern Beijing opener: languidly floating diaphanously-begowned fairy maidens floating on clouds of Buddhist fairy-land stage smoke. Actually rather elegant, I have to admit.

The Opening Gala's "Italian Orchestra" playing themes from classic films

An even more elaborate staged song and dance involved a giant mechanical floating bridge that opened, robot-transformer style, into what looked like a giant space alien-toad that threatened to eat up not only the singer perched precariously on top but also the entire National Performing Arts Centre and its inhabitants. (I believe the intention was to represent a vast, sublime mountain scape, but believe me, the giant toad image stuck). More money flowed onto the stage in the form of the “Italian Film Orchestra”, an entire symphony orchestra flown in from Europe to play a medley of Western film music classics (more John Williams/Henry Mancini than Sergei Prokofiev).

A selection of famous Chinese directors and actors was paraded across the stage in a spurious celebration of “awards” to “Excellent Chinese films in External Trade in 2010”. This was clearly designed as an excuse to put film celebrities like John Woo, Leon Lai, Wang Xueqi, Feng Xiaogang, Xu Fan, Zhang Jingchu, and Wang Xueqi on official display.

No Chinese national arts gala event would be complete without a horrifically picturesque “ethnic minorities harmoniously dance to power” number. Here, dancers clad in every imaginable ‘colorfully exotic’ kind of garb lip-synched to a weirdly atavistic drum beat. I can only guess that the choreographers took their inspiration from the Stravinsky/Nijinsky primitive-esque Sacre du printemps via old Hollywood oogah oogah “savage native” dance numbers. At least the music and dance, in a weirdly naked way, articulated the “civilized centre’s” actual attitude towards its decorative minority subjects.

After which, as a touching farewell, Olympic ballad crooner Liu Huan favored us with a BJIFF tribute song.

I look forward to the 2nd annual BJIFF: may its mission statement favor a little more culture, a lot more films, a little less “world-class”, and a lot less “cultural extravaganza”. And keep the local flavor: Beijing always welcomes you.

Relevant Classroom Use

BEIJING – Organizers of a long-standing Chinese independent documentary film festival pulled the plug on their own May 1-7 event a day after the state-run First Beijing International Film Festival announced a documentary section, local media reported Wednesday.

Organizers of the Eighth Documentary Film Festival China in the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou surprised participants by canceling the event that for seven years has been one of the country’s few outlets for non-fiction films made outside the state-approved filmmaking system.

“I was surprised that they suddenly canceled the event,” director Xu Xin told the English-language Global Times late Tuesday.

Xu, who is best known for his film Karamay, about a theater fire that killed 323 mostly Muslim schoolchildren in western China in 1994, had submitted his new film, Pathway, to the festival for its world premiere, but organizers told him Monday that the festival was canceled. Karamay has never screened in China.*

Festival art director Zhu Rikun told The Global Times that organizers worried that filmmakers would get into trouble if this year they went ahead with the festival that has screened more than 300 films from home and abroad since 2004.

“We canceled it ourselves,” Zhu said Tuesday. “The overall situation was tense, and we had received a lot of pressure,” he said, without explaining what pressures were encountered. Zhu did not answer his mobile phone on Wednesday or Thursday.

The pressure against the independent festival coincides with the most expansive assault on dissent in China in years. High-profile critics like the artist Ai Weiwei have been arrested and cut off from communicating with their families and the public. Also, scores of little-known bloggers, rights lawyers and democracy advocates have disappeared into the country’s opaque legal system.

The crackdown began two months ago, prompted by government fears that the Arab revolts against autocracy in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya could spread to China and threaten the Communist Party’s 61-year rule.

Graphic from the Beijing International Movie Festival (beijingfilmfest.org)

The first Beijing International Film Festival, which is set to start Saturday with backing from the Beijing city government, on Tuesday announced a documentary film competition component to its six-day program.

Director Xu said the Tongzhou documentary festival was one of the best of its kind in China because of its independence, high submissions standards and world-famous film commentators.

Festival organizer Li Shanshan said the content of the films planned for this year’s event was not a problem. “It’s a sensitive time” she said.

Karin Chien, the head of dGenerate Films, a New York based company that helps independent Chinese documentarians find distribution outside China, said she was not surprised by the festsival’s closure.

“I didn’t see it coming, thought it’s not a surprise given how heavily the government has cracked down recently,” said Chien in an email to The Hollywood Reporter.

* Editor’s note: Karamay has never officially screened in China.

Relevant Classroom Use

Director Ying Liang

Director Ying Liang was interviewed at the Apple Store Sanlitun Beijing, as part of the “Meet the Filmmakers” series, co-presented by the Apple Store in Beijing and dGenerate Films, an ongoing series to showcase China’s newest filmmakers powered by digital technology.

Ying Liang graduated from the Department of Directing at the Chongqing Film Academy and Beijing Normal University. He directed his first feature film,Taking Father Home (2005), which won awards at the Tokyo Filmex Film Festival, the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. In 2006, Ying made The Other Half (2006), which is supported by the Hubert Bals Fund (HBF) from the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film also won the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo Filmex Film Festival.

The video of Ying’s interview is in three parts, with an English transcript following each video. Video of Part One is below. Click through to view both videos and the full transcript. Interview conducted by Gigi Zhang. Videography by Michael Cheng. English transcription and subtitles by Isabella Tianzi Cai.

Note: English subtitles for each video can be accessed by clicking on the CC button in the pop-up menu on the bottom right corner of the player. The subtitles can be repositioned anywhere on the screen by clicking on them (if they are not displaying properly, click them to adjust).

PART ONE:

Gigi: Thanks to everyone for coming and being interested in independent Chinese cinema. Many of you may not know Director Ying Liang that well, so why don’t we start by having him introduce himself? Could you talk about yourself a little bit? And also the shorts as well as longer films that you have made? What are their similarities?

YL: Thanks Gigi for introducing me, and addressing me as a director and a filmmaker, and associating me with the underground film production world. But honestly, I am not any of those. I am just some guy who likes this medium. I like using a DV camera to film things. What you see on the screen is a short by me. I am not very satisfied with this short. I made it last year or the year before last. It is roughly 14-minute long. I have done features before. Actually I’m working on one right now. Most of my shorts, a total of 14 of them, are shot in Zigong, Sichuan. This one is different from most of my other films. It has a more concrete narrative structure, and very linear in that sense. To most people it may also seem a little artsy. So far I have only been a one-man team for all my films. I spent my own savings of 30,000 yuan on my first feature. And I have not spent any more than this amount. I really don’t consider myself a film director. Being called one in this luxurious space makes me feel that I don’t deserve it, and I am a little reluctant to be called so. I know how embarrassing it must feel for Gigi to introduce me. But please proceed with the questions.

Gigi: We should not judge a director by the budget or the length of his or her work. You are being modest. So far you have made 13 shorts and three features. Do you think the shorts that you have made land you on your features in some way? What is the relationship between these two forms? Do you have any advice or suggestions for the film students sitting in the audience?

YL: My shorts are not much different from the shorts made by many other students in film schools. Back in school, I have been taught that shorts are a good exercise before making features in terms of production, producing, as well as screenwriting. In retrospect, I did see one other benefit of making shorts, that is, I could mature during the making of them. I am not satisfied with this particular film because it is not extraordinary in any way. Despite a slightly larger budget and a tighter narrative, it is still an average student short or medium-length film, depending on how you define a short. Right now, I am more interested in making shorter shorts, but with more room for creativity. I think this kind of short is more challenging to the mind, and at the same time, it is also most appropriate to this art form. Most of the time, it’s not easy to tell if a short is a narrative film, a documentary, or an experimental film. Shorts are a unique form; they foreground time. I have some friends who make shorts. I often share my thoughts with them and also with my students at Songzhuang. They tell me interesting little things in life that they have neglected in the past. And I tell them that all these can be good materials for shorts. As for my features, I go about shooting them less effortlessly. The experiences that I have gained by making shorts are certainly helpful, especially in terms of working around a tight budget.

Gigi: You mentioned that you only spent 30,000 yuan for your first feature. Did you shoot it on DV cam?

YL: Yes. Before 2008, I used MiniDV. After 2008, I used HDV. I don’t think that my techniques have improved much whereas the technology has certainly kept developing. I think I am lazy. I don’t always know how good I want my films to look because to me, that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is the freedom enjoyed by the artist, which includes the freedom from state production codes, the freedom from economic concerns, and the freedom for artistic creativity. I like being able to use this medium to tell interesting snippets of life in creative ways. I want to keep my relationship with filmmaking pure. The filmmaking process is not yet industrialized for me; my production team has been small, so has my budget.

Gigi: You mentioned that your filmmaking process is not yet industrialized. But I wish to ask you more about the funding of your films. I know that in the past you have secured some funding through overseas organizations. Was that helpful? Do you know if other independent filmmakers have also been funded as such?

YL: This is the most industrialized space that my film has ever been screened. For me, getting funding from overseas organizations was purely by chance, and it was atypical. At the time, I just finished my first film. I didn’t think about distributing it. I looked for some film festivals online, and I sent off my film to them. Surprisingly, it received some awards, including cash awards. I didn’t expect to have these cash awards at all. However, they did help me get started on my next film projects or related works, such as writing a screenplay, preparing for shooting, etc. I kept working, and more cash awards came by that way. I also applied for funding. But my relationship with overseas organizations hasn’t been very good. One reason is that I don’t like being restricted in any way, certainly not in my filmmaking process, and also not in my life. Money always gets offered with conditions attached. It is the same with an investor as with a cultural institution. These conditions could restrict me. They could make me feel not being true to my own calling. Every person knows to be grateful. Making a film is hard work. After you complete a film, if you show it to others and get approved by them, you feel proud of your work. However, when you are offered money for the work you have done, you are naturally inclined to feel grateful towards the offer. That could somehow shape your future film projects in unforeseeable ways, which could be restricting. For example, it could affect your attitude towards filmmaking, your choice of subjects, etc. I often tell myself not to be affected by such funding. I want to continue being myself. The relationship between me and some overseas organizations is mostly just collaborative. If they ask too much of me and make me feel too restricted, I tend to give up the funding or the project. But I should mention that the reason that I am here today. dGenerate Films Inc. is a New York-based nontheatrical distributor of independent Chinese films. My films have been distributed by them to North American colleges mostly. They helped me make my work known overseas. I have to thank them here today.

PART TWO:

Gigi: You said that you had a collaborative relationship with overseas organization, but I take it to mean that it was also a business relationship in which both sides have invested interests. For people who just arrived, this is director Ying Liang. He studied film production at Beijing Normal University and later also studied directing at Chongqing University. He is currently an independent filmmaker. I learned that when you were at Beijing Normal University, you were classmates with Ning Hao, who now makes short and medium-length films. In terms of filmmaking practices, what do you see as the differences between him and you as well as the similarities?

YL: Starting from 1993 or 1994, the filmmaking program was put in place as part of an adult education program. However, our educational policies changed, so this program no longer exists. Peng Tao, who directed Little Moth, Han Jie, Yang Jin were all from there. Sadly this program is no longer there. This is a comprehensive program. From observing life, to writing screenplays, to producing films, to auditioning actors and actresses, to editing, everything was taught to us. You can say that each of learned how to complete a film by himself, or with the help of a very small team. In this sense, I don’t see much difference between us. The difference is rather at a more personal level. For examples, our interests are different, and our conceptions of film too. Every filmmaker or artist is an individual entity. His or her preferred way of working is analogous to a college graduate’s choice of employment.

Gigi: You are one of the organizers of Chongqing Independent Film and Video Festival. You made a statement there that went like: “The future of Chinese narrative films, unlike that of Chinese documentaries, isn’t bright; they will be very limited.” Could you explain what you meant by that? Why did you express two different views on our narrative films and our documentaries?

YL: I referred to independent narrative films because these films don’t often pass muster with the censors. Officials from China’s Film Bureau like to say – although I have not heard it myself, but I read it in writing – that young and independent filmmakers who make personalized and subjective films do not have a future. I used to think that this was only true in China. However, this March when I was in Kuala Lumpur, I heard something similar from the chief officer of the Malaysian Film Bureau. Malaysia also has a group of independent filmmakers, who are very similar to mainland Chinese independent filmmakers. They were told by the officer too that if they kept making personalized films there would be no future for them. I should note that the future in my speech and the future in those people’s speeches are different. I was being frank. I think if anyone wants to be an independent filmmaker, he or she needs to be prepared to sacrifice a lot first. Some people asked me before how I was able to keep at my job as an independent filmmaker, what difficulties I had had, etc. Usually I told them that I did not have any difficulties. I made my choices, and I should be responsible for all the consequences of my choice. Since this is the case, there is really no complaint to be made, and perseverance is unknown to me. If I felt that I had to persevere instead of just being an independent filmmaker, I would no longer enjoy being one. I think if a person does not enjoy what he or she is doing, he or she might as well give it up. Instead of making independent films, why not play computer games on Mac Books or surf the Internet? For me, I find the Apple interface too difficult to navigate and their desktop icons too small to notice, and I do not always remember the shortcut keys, so I give up Apple. Making independent films and using an Apple computer are similar in nature. It depends on your interest. To those who don’t enjoy it, I would suggest not take it too seriously. Do something you enjoy then.

Gigi: Are you an Apple user?

YL: I am sorry I am not. I do not get much funding. Compared to PC, it is very high-end. Like I said earlier, having my film screened here was certainly very high-end for me.

Gigi: We have been here talking for a while. Shall we change gears and have you introduce your film on the screen?

YL: Sure. It has been playing for a while.

Gigi: Which film is this?

YL: The Other Half. It was shot in 2006. Its story is related to women’s rights movement. It is a narrative film. I edited it using Adobe Premiere 6.5.

Gigi: You have just watched excerpts from director Ying Liang’s The Other Half. This film won four international awards, right?

YL: Not important.

Gigi: Including the Woosuk Award at Jeonju International Film Festival in Korea.

PART THREE:

Man: The number of people who are interested in seeing Chinese independent films is increasing. Although many of these films have won awards at international film festivals, they are not available to majority of the population in China. We often have to search for these films on Taobao.com. I want to know what you think about this phenomenon. And my second question is whether you wish to make commercial films in the future?

YL: Personally I am quite satisfied with everything. I know many filmmakers as well as artists from other fields want to reach a wider audience, but I am not that way. It is not extremely important to me whether people see my work or not, and I do not think my films are that important anyway. You probably have noticed that my films are closely tied to the social milieu of our time. They are mostly based on my personal experiences and observations. And they do not amount to anything larger. If I am interested in larger topics and themes, such as Chinese youth culture or gay culture, like Professor Cui Zi’en, I will do something different. What I film is mostly based on my personal choices. I think our visual media have very limited influences on people, and you can almost argue that it has no influence at all. Ideally speaking, our visual media, people in general, and society at large are three distinct entities, and they should be that way. This is just my personal opinion. As to where to see these films, in China the opportunities are truly limited. Film festivals are one of the venues, but there aren’t so many. You can buy from the Internet, but you need to do extensive search before finding what you want.  BT downloading is another way, and I am not against such illegal channels. I am content with the fact that people who want to see it can see it. I do not care that much about my films or how to distribute them. If I do, then I will start making commercial films and aim for the market, with schemes about how to do so. But that really isn’t what I like. I like this personal relationship with film. If this friendship is contaminated by personal interests, I will no longer like it as much, and I may do something else altogether. Everything I do now has something to do with visual media. As Gigi mentioned, I helped organize a film festival, and I taught a filmmaking class at Songzhuang. But all these things are done out of pure interests, without the concern of making money. All the profits that I have made happened by chance. I like it this way. Either I do voluntary work for others, or I do it for myself. That is also why I dissuaded my students from becoming independent filmmakers because they will faced many difficulties, many demands, and many misunderstandings.

Gigi: You mentioned that your films were marketed in North America. When you were shooting them, did you want to cater to their taste specifically?

YL: This is something that I resist a lot. North America is only one part of the map because there are film festivals all over the world. I mentioned North America because this event was organized by a New York-based distributor. I was invited here to screen my film and talk about it. What you brought up is something I resist a lot. I like to think the relationship between me and various foundations as ordinary friendship. I want to maintain it that way. Think about a film critic and a filmmaker. They have to maintain certain distance.

Relevant Classroom Use