The Sixth Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF) has had to switch venues twice following pressure by the police, obliging the organisers to inform festival-goers of the last-minute location changes.

BIFF, now in its sixth year, is showing over 50 cutting-edge feature films, documentaries, experimental works and animations in Songzhuang, a village on the outskirts of Beijing which is known as a hub for its avant-garde artistic community. The meddling by the authorities – while stopping short of shutting down the festival itself – has thrown into the spotlight the heavy scrutiny that the independent arts face in China by the one-party state.

Karin Chien, founder of dGenerate Films, a New York-based distribution company that specialises in distributing independent Chinese film to audiences worldwide, says she that was not surprised by the most recent interference from the authorities.

“Authorities caused BIFF to change venues twice, to the point where screenings were being held in the festival’s headquarters,” Chien, who was present at the launch event, wrote to IPS in an email. ‘So when the police showed up to stop the first screening, it wasn’t a surprise. The documentary version of BIFF was canceled by the authorities in May, so I suppose we were all holding our breath to see what would happen this time.”

Read the full report at IPS

Click through to access the full program of The 6^th Beijing Independent Film Festival

(compiled by Genevieve Carmel)

General Program Curator: Hao Jian

Art Director: Wang Hongwei

General Programmers: Hao Jian, Gan Lin, Liu Yonghong, Wang Hongwei

Forum Hosts: Zhu Rikun, Hao Jian, Yang Yang

Fiction

HELP Hu Yichuan

ADULT MAGAZINE Zhao Xianzu

WINTER SPRING Chen Zhimin

THE SENTIMENTAL ANIMAL Wu Quan

HUAN HUAN Song Chuan

THE DITCH Wang Bing

LOST IN THE MIRROR Ruoban

TOO MUCH CO² Lai Jinkun

HEAT WAVE Qi Zhonghua

EMBRACING NOT SLEEP YongLee

THE TOWER OF IMMORALITY Zhao Kai

FOLLOW THE SHADOW Xiao Han

BLIND WHITE  Sun Shi

THE HEDGEHOG Shi Nuo

FOUR COWARDS Mai Mai

TWENTY DOLLARS Lam See Chit

FLYING TRAIN He Suosi

TRIBULUS TERRESTRIS Deng Li

MY FATHER Li Pisen

Documentary  (Programmed by Zhu Rikun and Wang Hongwei)

25 WORDS Liu Shen

APUDA He Yuan

NO COUNTRY FOR PRIVATE HOUSES He Liren

DOCUMENTARY

PATHWAY Xu Xin

THE NEXT LIFE Fan Jian

BEIJING BESIEGED BY WASTE Wang Jiu-liang

SHATTERED Xu Tong

A VILLAGE WITH TWO Zha Xiaoyuan

THE HULLING RICE RECORD Gui Shuzhong

THE COLD WINTER Zheng Kuo

THE OPAQUE GOD Gu Tao and Zhou Yu

THE JOURNEY OF POETRY AND DISEASE Geng Jun

GAS Lin Xin
WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS Ji Dan

THE UNFINISHED HISTORY OF LIFE Cong Feng

MOTHER WANG PEIYING Hu Jie

PORTABLE OCCUPATION Xiao Ben

5+5 Xu Xing and Andrea Cavazzuti

FADING REFLECTIONS Sha Qing

MY MOTHER’S RHAPSODY Qiu Jiongjiong

SOLEMN TRANQUILITY Zhang Zanbo

A VIEW OUT OF MY WINDOW Yu Wenhao

MOST BEAUTIFUL DAY Yu Wenhao

Experimental (Programmed by Zhang Haitao)

A CERTAIN PERSON ON A CERTAIN DAY AT A CERTAIN TIME AT 798 ART DISTRICT Bai Budan

ARCHITECTURE Xu Ruotao

STRUCTURE OF CRYSTAL II Zhao Yu

THE EMPTY ROOM Hu Yangyi

A WORM Han Qiang

I TRAVEL THROUGH TIME TO MEET YOU AGAIN Yang Zhengfan

YOU SAVED ME ON YOUR HAND Chang Po-Yang

DISAPPEARING IN GREEN GRASS, WILD GRASS, AND DUCKWEED Zhang Zanbo

DUST Peng Xiang

AROMA Peng Xiang

Animation (Programmed by Wang Bo)

CITY INTRODUCTION Wang Zhan

THE BLUE HOUSE Gao Siyang and Yang Tianheng

FACE Zhang Tongyue

THE WALL Gu Zhihai

APPLE PICKING Chai Mi

TOGETHER FOREVER Ma Manjie

CHASING Wu Chao

African Section (Programmed by Gertjan Zuilhof and Zhu Rikun)

LI XIA’S SALON Omelga Mthiyane

SNAKE Samson ‘Xenson’ Ssenkaaba

FIRE FLY Caroline Kamya

ZUT! Amour Sauveur Memy

Retrospective Section about Satoh Makoto (Programmed by Zhu Rikun and Hiroki Nakayama)

LIVING ON THE RIVER AGANO Satoh Makoto

MEMORIES OF AGANO Satoh Makoto

OUT OF PLACE MEMORIES OF EDWARD SAID Satoh Makoto

Special Screening Section

CELESTIAL KINGDOM Wang Chao

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.

Listen to a podcast interview with Wong from the Sinica podcast on Popup Chinese.

We interviewed Wong about his experience reporting this story and its broader relevance on art and culture in contemporary China.

dGF: What attracted you to report on this story?

Edward Wong: While living in Beijing, I had watched and greatly admired two of Zhao Liang’s films, “Crime and Punishment” and “Petition.” In November 2010, I met him at a dinner in the 798 arts district with Karin Chien, the founder of dGenerate Films. At that time, he was working on “Together,” a documentary that the Health Ministry had commissioned as a public service announcement about people with HIV/AIDS. For the film, he had just recorded a song by Peng Liyuan, the celebrity wife of Xi Jinping, the man who is expected to become the next leader of China. Zhao also told me about how he had used social networking websites to track down interview subjects with HIV/AIDS. This new project sounded interesting. We talked a lot too about the making of “Crime and Punishment,” and about how he had lied to police officers to get access to their station house in northeast China.

I found Zhao to be an engaging person, and I thought that he might make an interesting profile. As I spent time with him, I found he had a lot of interesting things to say not only about making films, but also about the role of artists and intellectuals in China.

dGF: Given that this story is part of a series on Culture and Control in China, do you see the issues and challenges that Zhao Liang faced common to other cultural sectors or artists in China?

Wong: Yes, the challenges that Zhao Liang confronts every time he makes a film are familiar to artists across China. The question I keep hearing from artists here, especially those who work in a mass medium like film, is: How do you maintain your artistic integrity and get your work seen without bowing too much to government restrictions? In the American system, it’s often market forces, represented most powerfully by studio executives, that hold sway over filmmakers. Here, the government can have great influence over a film if the filmmaker wants wide distribution for it. Filmmakers who want their films seen in theaters both engage in self-censorship and negotiate with censors over scripts and rough cuts.

Even though Zhao went through that process on “Together,” the documentary still turned out to be a socially committed film, and Zhao doesn’t seem to have bought into the system – he told me his next film will be made in an independent manner, outside the censorship process and with foreign financing. But if he does go the independent route, which is a familiar one for him, he’ll have to live with the fact that the film almost certainly will not be seen by many Chinese. During our interviews, he told me repeatedly that he makes films for a Chinese audience.

Gu Changwei, a supervising director on “Together” and a much more prominent filmmaker than Zhao, has chosen to make movies within the system. On every production, he has to negotiate with representatives of the state. He told me the film bureau and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, or Sarft, are “the most conservative – there’s no way to be more cautious than they are.” This is what many artists working in different media across China face: negotiating their work and their relations with conservative censors and officials, many of whom come from an older generation.

dGF: What were the most significant ways that working on this article changed or enhanced your understanding of independent films and filmmakers in China?

Wong: The most interesting aspect of researching this article was seeing the dialogue between filmmakers with an independent spirit and the state. During the reporting process, I learned in detail from Zhao Liang, Gu Changwei and others about the negotiations that take place between filmmakers and representatives of the government, particularly with censors from the film bureau. I felt privileged to get a glimpse into the way the system works. Zhao described for me some of the discussions he had with censors and officials over content in “Together.” It was interesting for me to hear what roles various government bodies played – the Health Ministry, the Central Propaganda Department and the film bureau of Sarft.

Gu had an interesting story about navigating the system in order to get approval from the film bureau for “Love for Life,” the narrative fiction film that was a companion piece to “Together.” Once Gu had the idea for the film, he had to first get support from the Health Ministry before film officials would approve the project, since it was on a topic (HIV/AIDS) that some officials still consider sensitive, and it was based on a banned book. Once health officials had agreed to back the project, the film officials knew they could shift the blame to the health officials if anything went wrong, so they granted approval. This process of constant negotiation was fascinating to me.

As for as filmmakers working outside the system, I found in my reporting that independent directors and producers are dedicated to their visions of society and work together in a community to realize those visions even when there is little financial backing and no official support. Despite the constant attempts by the state to control the industry, that fierce spirit makes me optimistic about Chinese film.

dGF: How would you characterize the response to your article, especially in comparison between Chinese and non-Chinese readers?

Wong: The response has been consistently positive. Many Western readers told me they find Zhao Liang compelling and thought the narrative revealed to them the intricacies of artistic creation and political dialogue in China. My Chinese friends who have read the article in English said it accurately shows the nuances in making choices that relate to the state.

If you’re an intellectual in China, these are choices and decisions you grapple with all the time, in ways big and small, and I think many intellectuals in China get frustrated with how Westerners often frame those choices: as a duality between being a complete rebel or being a sellout. For many foreigners, Ai Weiwei, for better or for worse, has come to represent the ideal of an artist in China. Zhao Liang and many Chinese intellectuals do not follow Ai Weiwei’s lead. They take a more pragmatic path. Certainly they create art or start public conversations that make many officials uncomfortable, but they sometimes acquiesce to demands by officials too. And the government and the Communist Party are not monolithic. There are officials who quietly support even some of the more controversial work by these artists. There’s a fluidity in China, and people move in both directions. One Chinese friend wrote this to me in an email: “The piece did a good job showing the readers the dilemma artists like Zhao are facing in China today, and that agreeing to work within the system can have many subtle implications and is not as black-and-white as ‘going over to the dark side.’” Last time I checked, there wasn’t much response from readers on Zhao Liang’s microblog, but one person commented that the story was the most complete one he or she had read on Zhao, and that Zhao was “niubi” which is Chinese slang for ultra-cool.

dGF: Reading about Zhao Liang being caught between two worlds (the independent network and the state apparatus), I couldn’t help wondering if it was analogous to your own position as a reporter working in China for a U.S. newspaper. What sort of challenges do you experience in your role as a foreign reporter? Does working for a major publication like the NY Times bring any kind of stigma (positive or otherwise) to your interactions in China?

Wong: Working for a Western news media organization in China draws a wide range of reactions from ordinary Chinese. It really can vary, so I don’t want to generalize. From my experience with the central government and with local authorities, Chinese officials are at best ambivalent and at worst downright hostile to foreign journalists. That reaction can change from region to region, or as broader political trends in China shift.

I wouldn’t say my situation is analogous at all to that of Chinese artists and intellectuals. The fact that I have foreign citizenship makes a big difference in my relationship with the Chinese state, obviously. I don’t feel the pressures from the state as keenly. Also, I work in the American mass media system, which has much wider latitude for freedom of expression than mass media in China.

That said, I do think that whenever you work in an institution, you become bound by the limits of that institution, and that’s where I would say my experience might have some overlap with that of Chinese artists and intellectuals. As is obvious to anyone who reads it, The New York Times has strict formats in which news is presented and rules that govern how reporters write their stories. It can be something as simple as choice of words, for example, or it can have more to do with judging what crosses the line between so-called objective reporting and opinion. These are things that all reporters at The New York Times and in other news media organizations negotiate everyday. I have great respect for The New York Times and its role in public discourse in the United States, but there are boundaries that reporters are always trying to navigate and limits that they are testing. I believe this situation helps me empathize with Chinese artists and intellectuals, though the world in which they operate is a much tougher one, and they are much braver souls than me.

Relevant Classroom Use

Jia Zhangke speaks out at a forum held at the 2011 Shanghai International Film Festival (photo: china.org.cn)

Originally published in The Guardian, June 16 2011

He had to abandon one film lest it broke anti-pornography laws. Then he ditched a spy movie rather than fill it with Communist party “superheroes”.

The frustration of making films in a country with “cultural over-cleanliness” has led an internationally acclaimed Chinese director to lash out at its censors, a state news site has reported.

Jia Zhangke won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival in 2006 – apparently earning the approval of China’s leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping, who is expected to become president next year.

But he began his career as an “underground” film-maker – directing movies that were praised abroad but never saw official release in China– and he complained of ongoing battles with censors as he addressed a cultural forum in Shanghai. Unusually, his remarks were reported by an official news site, china.org.cn.

“The only reason that we cannot make genre movies is the barrier that censorship sets,” Jia said.

He said he scrapped a film about a man’s sex life after an official decided it might break anti-pornography laws. He also abandoned a spy film about the Communist party and Kuomintang due to controls.

“If I want to make the movie here, I have to portray all the communists as superheroes,” Jia said.

“This would betray my original idea and make it difficult to develop the story.”

He added: “This kind of cultural over-cleanliness that bans the erotic, violent and terrifying is cultural naivety.”

China has a vast censorship apparatus, but films and television programmes are particularly tightly controlled. One film director told the Guardian that censors demanded 400 changes before they would pass his movie.

Hong Kong director and producer Manfred Wong told the Shanghai forum that in crime movies made on the mainland all police officers must be portrayed as good guys, while romantic movies cannot show affairs or cohabitation before marriage.

He argued that mainland film-makers need a ratings system. Some believe the government might relax constraints if age restrictions were introduced.

But Li Hongyu, who writes about film for Southern Weekly newspaper, said it was simplistic to suggest a ratings system would result in less censorship.

While western ratings systems focus on issues such as violence and pornography, China has much wider concerns about the content of films, he said.

“China’s control over movies is more detailed. China has a movie censoring committee composed of approximately 30 or so staff whose backgrounds are very diverse, spanning from movie professionals, the Women’s Federation, the [Communist] Youth League, teachers, and a religious committee to various governmental administration departments,” Li added.

“The debate about introducing a ratings system has been going on for many years. But it is hard to implement, since if the system is used, it will not be easy to cover the government’s other considerations. What if it is concerned about political views?”

Official requirements, which concern the moral as well as political qualities of content, can be baffling to outsiders: the head of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television recently denounced TV time travel dramas for their “frivolous” approach to history.

Jia Zhangke’s film Dong is available through the dGenerate catalog.

Relevant Classroom Use

Zhou Hao presents his film "The Transition Period" at the China Documentary Festival in Hong Kong (photo: Associated Press)

The 2011 Chinese Documentary Festival in Hong Kong concluded earlier this month with awards given to The Transition Period by Zhou Hao and One Day in May by Ma Zhandong. The Transition Period will be distributed later this year by dGenerate, which already distributes one of Zhou’s earlier films, Using.

In a report on the festival for the Associated Press, Min Lee describes The Transition Period as “a rare, fascinating look at how the Chinese government operates:”

Guo Yongchang, who is currently serving a seven-year prison term for accepting bribes of 2 million Chinese yuan ($310,000), is shown discussing how to split tax revenue with lower-level officials, meeting with constituents as well as smearing birthday cake onto the face of an American businessman and wining and dining with Taiwanese businessmen in another drunken episode. A secretly recorded sound section shows Guo ordering an aide to return certain bribes.

Zhou said he met Guo at a dinner and the former official quickly agreed to be filmed. He said he got full access — although avoided shooting Guo’s family life. Guo has seen the documentary — minus the secretly taped section — and didn’t object, Zhou said.

When asked if he worried if such a film could cause trouble for him with the authorities, Zhou responded: “my understanding is that you can basically film everything you want to film. The key question is whether you want to shoot something. If you want to shoot something, you can definitely do it.”

In the context of recent troubles experienced by socially critical artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhou said that he and other artists have benefitted from the sacrifices made by such figures. “There are many people taking the heat for us … What should we be afraid of?” Zhou said. Zhou also cited the example of  Xu Xin, whose six-hour Karamay investigates a heavily censored story about 300 children who died in a fire while performing for government officials.

Fellow director Ma Zhandong agreed with Zhou’s position: “If you like what you are doing, you can overcome the hurdles.” Ma’s film One Day in May, which won the festival’s top prize, follows a family’s recovery from the deadly 2008 earthquake in southwestern Sichuan conference. Its unflinching depiction of the social and economic fallout from the earthquake recalls that of the award-winning film 1428 by Du Haibin, which is part of the dGenerate catalog.

Read the full version of the Associated Press report.

Relevant Classroom Use

Since the story made various international news outlets late last month, you may already have heard of the cancellation of this year’s DOChina, the independent documentary film festival scheduled for May 1 to May 7 in Songzhuang, an artists’ village in the suburb of Beijing. Well, it was cancelled, but a number of us still made the one and a half hour trek to Songzhuang, whether out of habit or hope that there would be some films waiting for us.

DOChina was supposed to have screened 26 films to its usual audience of Beijingers, filmmakers, Songzhuang residents, and a number of foreign guests (programmers, researchers, film institute reps) who come to form a regular audience. Alas, this was not to be. Several levels of government, represented at a surprisingly high level, made it clear to the sponsoring organisation of the festival, Li Xianting’s Film Fund that this was not the right time for an independent organization to screen Chinese films that the state has not authorized. The Film Fund organizers, unwilling to have their films vetted in advance, chose to call off the festival.

Various reasons were given for why this was precisely the “wrong time” to hold the festival. There are of course the Arab popular democratic uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Oman, and Syria, which the Chinese government can’t help but find relevant to their own situation. There are the recent sporadic, low-key Sunday afternoon “walks” in crowded districts of major cities, which so far seem only to have inspired large contingents of security agents and foreign reporters to congregate and observe each other (or interact in less friendly ways). There is the detention and disappearance of Ai Weiwei, some of his staff, and subsequent detention of five Songzhuang performance artists in the weeks before DOChina was to start.

And there was the coincidental timing of the 1st annual Beijing International Film Festival (April 23-28), in many ways the opposite of DOChina. The BIFF bestrode the capital with glossy, state-sponsored, high-budget and high profile media-driven events, attended by a galaxy of prominent foreign representatives from overseas film festivals and other organizations. (Apparently even a few film screenings, though these were more or less buried amidst the hoopla). Add to that the fact that DOChina, always good at keeping just the right kind of low profile to function the way it wanted, had been on the radar of the national government since an incident from two years ago, when two American film makers scheduled to attend were denied visas, prompting an inquiry from a foreign reporter at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs press conference. In light of so many bad bellwethers, organizers said they were in fact not surprised that this edition of their festival had to be called off.

What happened instead? An opening banquet, attended by the festival staff, filmmakers associated with past editions of the festival and foreign guests. In a strange twist, graciously footing the bill were jovial representatives of the local government (including a table of heavyset guys in the corner, whose serious mien didn’t exactly fit the profile of a Songzhuang artist type). Our host officials had a slightly less charming follow-up act. Starting the next day, some foreign guests staying in the Songzhuang guesthouse had a none-too-discreet escort in the form of plainclothes cops following them through the town. Impressively (from the point of view of the manpower available for a trivial surveillance duty like this one), one of the cops spoke English well enough to have a brief chat with one of my colleagues who was out for a stroll.

Over the next few days, we could meet several of the filmmakers whose films had been scheduled, and we could watch a few of their films on DVDs on a TV set. (The screening rooms were strictly off limits.) There were opportunities to talk with the director afterwards, usually around meals. So on a makeshift scale, something like the standard festival “screening + Q&A” format materialized. These small gatherings were good for the directors to receive feedback and for visitors to learn more about the directors’ work. But this was not a film festival by any means.

DOChina was neither revolutionary nor radical. The organizers are savvy, and know when it’s time to press forward, and when it’s time to take a temporary step back. A very similar event might reappear later in a somewhat different incarnation, in a less sensitive location (i.e. one far from the capital), with a different name. For now, I hope this step back will lead to a stronger, more vibrant, even more independent China Documentary Film Festival in the future.

Relevant Classroom Use

By Isabella Tianzi Cai

Han Han (photo: China Digital Times)

Ranked as one of the world’s 100 most influential people in a 2010 survey by Time, 28-year-old Chinese writer and rally racer Han Han has been in fact long well-known within China. While in high school, his essay “Seeing Ourselves in a Cup” won the first prize in China’s New Concept Writing Competition. Not long after, he dropped out of high school to free himself from China’s intensely selective education system and embark on a lifelong journey of self-learning.  Since then he has written and published numerous articles and a dozen novels, many of which relate directly to contemporary controversial Chinese political issues.Because he can be exceedingly candid and honest in writing, a number of his blog posts have been censored by the state’s Propaganda Department. However, his blog continues to be one of the hottest in China. There, he helps the silenced minorities in China assert their uttermost concerns; he also critiques the Chinese culture from a fresh perspective of the “post-80s generation:” China’s youth who have grown up during the country’s economic boom and are often characterized as apolitical and consumer-obsessed.

In May this year, Han Han gave a speech at Xiamen University, titled “Why China Cannot Be a Cultural Superpower,” a translation of which can be found at Chinahush. The speech exemplifies his brash yet eloquent youthful critique of the Chinese establishment. In it, he mocks the current restrictive cultural environment under which Chinese writers and artists work, as well as the backwards attitudes of officials in wanting to both control domestic media and culture as well as their reception abroad:

I hope our workers in the press, our students and teachers, every one who loves and engages in culture including every webmaster can make an effort to decrease the amount of censorship and relieve words and webs that are blocked. I also hope that our leaders – mind that these leaders are different from you guys – and our government can be confident enough to let go the culture. I know that our leaders like to export our culture, this is a sign of a powerful country, but the thing is, the available cultures are too humble to go outside. When our writers write, they are self-censoring every second, how can any presentable works be possible when they are born under such environment? In the whole world, you castrate all of the works like news reports and present them to the foreigners, hoping it would sell, are foreigners aliens to you?

In order to fight what he calls the incompetence of state power, Han calls out for action, saying that if everyone is willing to participate in the usage of certain censored words, the condemned nature of these words will change: “Even if your names and my name go into the base, I believe there is a ceiling in the shield words base and every time a new word goes in, it pushes closer to the ceiling and will crash the whole thing down”.

Many of the titles distributed by dGenerate Films convey the spirit of social consciousness and freedom of expression endorsed in Han Han’s speech. Our films help raise consciousness of the ignored and/or forgotten past (Gai Shanxi and Her Sisters; Queer China, ‘Comrade’ China), spark debates in various important contemporary political and cultural issues (Meishi Street; Crime and Punishment), and bring the untouchable or unwatchable to their proper places in society so as to fight society’s overarching prejudices against them (Enter the Clowns; Using). We will continue working with such conscientious filmmakers, to make their works available to a global audience.

Relevant Classroom Use

Dhondup Wangchen (Photo courtesy of the New York Times)

According to a report on New York Times from Chongqing, China, a self-taught filmmaker who spent five months interviewing Tibetans about their hopes and frustrations living under Chinese rule is facing charges of state subversion after the footage was smuggled abroad and distributed on the Internet and at film festivals around the world.

Dhondup Wangchen, 35, has been detained since March 2008, just weeks after deadly rioting broke out in Tibet. Since October 2007, he began traveling the Tibetan plateau interviewing monks, yak herders and students about their lives. In the resulting 25-minute documentary “Leaving Fear Behind,” most of his subjects freely expressed their disdain for the Han Chinese migrants who are flooding the region and their love for the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since 1959.

The report also mentions that, with hundreds of lawyers, dissidents and journalists serving time in Chinese prisons, human rights organizations are busy lobbying the White House, members of Congress and the news media to press the Chinese government on such thorny topics as free speech, democracy and greater religious freedom.

Here is a brief biography of Dhondup Wangchen by Tsetring Gyaljong, a cousin who helped him make the documentary, and a news clip about Mr. Wangchen and his project on ABC News.

Relevant Classroom Use

“Notice on Strengthening DV Management in Theater, Television and on the Internet” was officially issued on May 24th, 2004 by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. The following is a translation of its main part:

As DV technology gradually becomes popular among social organizations and individuals, DV works have become a content source for video/audio programs on television and the internet. While most of these works are healthy and positive, some feature obscure or passive subject matters. Moreover, some individuals or organizations even send this kind of works to international film festivals, and cause negative impact. The Notice is to strengthen the management of DV broadcast.

1. TV stations, internet websites, and digital theaters must submit all DV works by individuals or social organizations to the censorship of “Radio and Television Management Regulation” and “Film Management Regulation” before their broadcast. Works against these regulations or with “unhealthy taste or problematic subject or direction” should be forbidden.  Works touching religion, ethnicity (minzu), or other sensitive social concerns must consult “relevant regional authorities” before their broadcast. Those with dubious concerns or possible negative social impact should not be aired.
2. The broadcast of DV works should follow the same regulations as those for films and TV programs. They must obtain “Permission to Broadcast Video/Audio Programs on the Internet” to go online, and follow “Film Management Regulations” to be screened in theaters. Anyone wishing to organize regional or national DV contests or festivals must report to the provincial Administration for Radio, Film, and TV.  Organization of international DV festivals must obtain the permission of  the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television.
3. All DV works must obtain the “TV Drama Distribution Permission” or “Film Public Screening Permission” before participating in overseas film festivals or contests. Any individual or organization submitting DV works to overseas film festivals without the above permission, and causing negative impact, would face a three-year ban from the screening of their DV works on all domestic TV stations, internet websites or digital theaters. The individual or organization will be also banned from any film or TV production for three years.

Relevant Classroom Use