Li Ning, director of Tape

Tape, a highly experimental documentary by performance artist, dancer and filmmaker Li Ning, made its European premiere last January at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Since then it has screened at the MoMA Documentary Fortnight and won the Silver Award at the Yunnan Multicultural Visual Exhibitions, aka YunFest. The film makes its West Coast premiere at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this Thursday April 7 as part of the series “Fearless: Chinese Independent Documentaries.”

The dGenerate catalog describes Tape as follows:

For five grueling years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist while contending with the pressures of modern life in China. He is caught between two families: his wife, son and mother, whom he can barely support; and his enthusiastic but disorganized guerilla dance troupe. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI.

dGenerate’s Kevin B. Lee interviewed Li Ning at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. The following is a transcript of the interview. Translation by Amy Yiran Xu and Isabella Tianzi Cai.

dGF: You were originally a dancer, sculptor and performance artist for many years. How did you begin to make videos? Tape was originally a dance performance piece. At what time did you decide to make Tape as a video?

Li Ning: It began in 2000. I owned a DV camera then. I used it to document my performances, with my troupe, and also our training. It started simple, and I didn’t expect myself to make a documentary. Kevin knows this, I feel strongly about Jinan. I have been seeing certain scenery and objects there for over 30 years. They have left a mark in my heart and in my head. I used this crappy camera and made my first film. It was an amateurish film, which was completed 10 years ago and lasted a little over 40 minutes. In my opinion, it was closely related to Tape. And at a deeper level it shares the same things with those in Tape, such as our human condition, our changing cityscape, the choices that each human being faces.

dGF: This concept of “tape,” how did you come up with the idea of it?

Li Ning: It started in 2002. One day while I was taking a nap, I spotted a spider climbing down my window panel. I hallucinated. I thought I saw it extruding tape, which was actually its silk, from its body. The tape looked sticky, thin, and shiny. And I wondered, what if one day we could witness interpersonal relationship as it manifested itself in the form of tape, instead of something invisible? What if some day if we can actually see someone chasing another person, sabotaging another person, or loving another person? Instead of apprehending such things through imagination? That was my idea then. In 2005, I formally started the project.

dGF: And at what point did you decide that you needed to film your family?

Li Ning: In 2005, my wife was pregnant. I wanted to make some home video about it then, and it was not intended for the actually film. At the time, I filmed everything around me without any intents or purposes. It was totally random. Well, some were in fact documents of my dance troupe since some footage showed the troupe members training and their gradual changes over time. Some were of my mother, who was getting old. I only wanted to document her so that I would not regret not doing it in the future. My intentions were simplistic. I find that once I intend what I film to be a documentary, it immediately gets pretentious and practical, though still enjoyable as a film. Put it another way, such kind of art becomes rootless; it loses its roots while still showing off its fruits.

dGF: At what point did this become a difficulty? At what point did it become a problem between your mother, your wife, and yourself? In the film, sometimes they object being filmed. How did you maintain your shooting even though they were not comfortable?

Li Ning: Yesterday someone asked me something similar; it was about whether I was being harmful to my family. Fiction film directors do not have this problem because they are free to avoid it. Documentary directors cannot. I think of documentary filmmakers as people who put themselves on an altar as if they are to be sacrificed. And when they sacrifice themselves, they also sacrifice those around them like their family and friends. I think that if documentary filmmakers aren’t able to make the sacrifice, then they can’t make documentaries, unless they feel comfortable filming someone drowning while standing offshore with their cameras.

If, however, they want to film something in which they are involved, then they must be prepared to sacrifice themselves. I don’t see this psychological determination as a moral dilemma because otherwise this kind of documentary can’t be made. If someone has a video camera in hand, then it’s obligatory for him or her to show the truth – this is how I see it.

I have had many internal conflicts with myself. It is cruel for me to decide to exhibit my personal experience in public, especially my bleeding experience. However, I have been filming myself for years. I think I have been rendered numb by the constant exposure. For example, initially I could not lay my eyes on the footage of me being beaten up, but the more I watched it, the more I wanted to laugh at myself. I even thought amusingly that those thugs could hit me harder.

When I look what I film, I forget that I am still part of my family. I feel that my existence is that of a video camera. Of course, I am still a human being with rich human emotions. I love my child and I love my mother very much. I had conflicts with my wife, but we were not foes. In Tape, I inserted footage of us strolling in a park. I showed it to her. It was to restore the previous damage done to her image. And it also made me feel easier.

dGF: I want to talk about some of the projects that are in the film. There is one scene where you take off all his clothes and starts climbing a construction site, and another scene where you also take off all his clothes and dives into an icy river, and all the other activities involving your troupe performing on highways, public sidewalks and demolition sites. How did you get the idea of doing these crazy projects?

Li Ning: To me, these projects are not crazy; they are ordinary. On the contrary, seeing people carrying their briefcases and following whatever they are told to do by the state is crazy. They have lost themselves. This is why sometimes I expose my body or do things that will prove my existence; these endeavors have a calming effect on me.

During the execution of these projects, the results were often quite unpredictable no matter how planned each step along the way was. And interestingly, the more uncustomary the planned course of action was, the more likely we were to feel our existence during the process.

I never want to harm anyone by doing whatever it is. That is why lots of details need to be taken care of. For example, we did not want to jeopardize drivers when we threw fake money on the road. We specifically avoided money that looked like real Chinese banknotes and used US dollars and spirit money instead. Accidents might occur if drivers got distracted by what we were doing. I value life a lot.

I like doing bizarre things, but my bottom line is that I will never harm others’ lives. I may harm myself though.

dGF: This movie takes a very difficult and challenging exploration of your relationships with people because there were a lot of secrets and private things involved, not just about your life but also about others, such as sexual relationships, family arguments, incidents which might embarrass most people. How do you make the decision to keep those things in the video, especially when it may involve the intimate details of others?

Li Ning: I don’t think that I have exposed too much about sex. I deliberately left space for audience to imagine things. Performances involving me being naked all took place in public space. I don’t think that I used naked bodies as a way to depict sex in Tape. In Tape, I made love with my comforter, not with a female body, not with my wife, not with any real person. I wanted to protect real people, and I wanted to give viewers space for imagination. Most people do not have a problem imagining sex when they are not showed it explicitly.

As for my relationship with my family, I have given the answer in my reply to the previous question. I try to be honest in depicting my relationship with them. I try not to contemplate whether I have indeed harmed them in the end. It is not the same as avoidance because my child will see this film when he grows up, and my wife will see it too. People who have seen this film told me that I had courage, but I know that I was just being bullheaded. I think that real courage will be shown when I answer to my child and my family members about the film many years from now.

dGF: How many in the movie have actually watched the final movie?

Li Ning: My family has watched bits and pieces. Other characters in the film have not seen it. Members of my dance troupe have all seen it.

dGF: So in some ways, your dance group is closer to you than your family.

Li Ning: Yes, I agree. This is the case for these years. I feel closer to them these years.

dGF: Can you say how your family and your dance group reacted when they saw the movie?

Li Ning: My mother called me one day and asked me to go over to her place – we lived in separated homes then. She told me that she watched some discs that I left in a drawer at her place. She asked me what I was doing with them because they were about our private life, some of which involved tense moments between her and me. I placated her by telling her that film was not intended to taken seriously as reality.

Before I came here, my wife and I were in some bad terms again. I was in a bad mood when I left. When I was in Beijing, just moments before I was about to board the plane, my mother called. She said she was afraid to call me. The cellphone she had was the one I used in Tape. The cellphone had always been left on, but it was off that day and she turned it on. She saw the greeting message on it, which was my will. She was scared by it and thought that I wasn’t coming back. I felt terribly sorry for my mother then. She is in her golden years yet she has to constantly worry about her adult son because he makes troubles all the time.

I joked about the will and told her that the phone was a piece of prop for my film and the message was part of a screenplay, I only left it on my phone because I was afraid that I might forget it. After she heard me saying so, she dropped her worries, asked me to be careful and not to think too much. She told me if I could, try not to get a divorce because a broken family would not be good for my child. I lied. I consoled her and told her not to worry.

As for the members of my dance troupe, they felt old when they were watching the film. They are still young, but it has been four or five years for them by now. They felt they had changed so much during this time. Some actually told me that they felt stupid about what they had done with me for the past four to five years. They realized that it was more important to go with the flow rather than try to change he status quo. But I consider myself going with the flow.

Wu Wenguang commented that my art was like an insurrection by the corporeal against the machine. I thought otherwise. I think I want to express struggle, which is instinctual, and it is different from rebel, which requires the faculty of reasoning.

dGF: Since you were talking about you mother, and you mention you lied to her, there is this issue of fiction and performance. Even though this film is documentary and trying to explore the honesty and truth of his life, there are still performances and you said some scenes are staged. How can you resolve the relationship between trying to achieve truth for your but also lying to his family and friends using fictional explanations?

Li Ning: I think I have given some answers in the previous questions. I consider myself a sacrifice, so I am psychologically prepared and anxiety-free. I want to continue doing what I have done, but I also apologize to people. Once I have set my mind to making this film, I can only keep doing it, and nothing could stop me.

There is a scene where I dived into an frozen river in Tape. All I wanted to achieve in that scene was to capture a human face beneath the ice of a frozen river. I needed to have this image for my film, and I did it without thinking about the consequences. If I had not had this image, I would not have been able to sleep, so it was better for me just to get it done. I had thought about this image for over a month before I finally filmed it. This is probably considered irresponsible and crazy. But like a poet, when he or she creates poetry, or art, he or she is prepared to sacrifice him or herself.

Even if you are not prepared to sacrifice yourself, someone else will. And when you do, you do not regret. I think I have found my place at Rotterdam. Few people have actually come to see my film, and it is not a big hit, but I know I’m presenting something truthful to the world. My point is that what’s real and true isn’t always recognized and accepted by most people, but it is beautiful. Maybe it is like soap bubbles and breaks easily, but for me, fleeting beauty is worth pursuing.

Relevant Classroom Use

Fortune Teller (dir. Xu Tong)

Over at the MUBI Notebook, one of the leading sites for writing on cinema, editor Daniel Kasman offers his report on the 2010 Vancouver International Film Festival, in which he names Xu Tong’s independent documentary Fortune Teller “the best film I saw this year at VIFF.” Fortune Teller was a prize-winner at the 2010 Beijing Independent Documentary Festival, but has yet to premiere in the United States, a fact that we are working to rectify within the near future. Read critic and VIFF programmer Shelly Kraicer’s description of the film, expanded from the VIFF Dragons and Tigers program notes.

Kasman’s report opens into an extended meditation on the historical significance of the current Chinese independent cinema, comparing it to the classic Hollywood productions of the 1930s. Most of his reflections on the topic are reproduced below:

———-

“The similarity I see between, say, an American film from the 1930s and a independent Chinese film from 2010, like Fortune Teller, a documentary that was the best film I saw this year at VIFF, is the understanding of filmmakers-producers that one’s country has a significant population, a population whose stories should be told and to whom stories about that population should be told.

American cinema has long since lost the desire as well as the general ability to be about Americans (except tepidly, inherently, generally), but contemporary non-mainstream Chinese cinema seems positively ravenous to rove across its massive countryside to find all manners of people and stories, their spaces, habits, and manners. One of the main differences is address: old American cinema was “about the people” (often cynically and calculatedly so), but this was more often than not because it was for the people: relatable, common stories for a mass, common audience. Current Chinese cinema, though, at least the kind I’m talking about, presumably has an audience primarily of overseas festival goers, and if they’re lucky, a slightly broader address via local distribution inside China as well as outside it. (Who, for example, will see Wang Bing’s films? Or the 6-hour documentary Karamay, which also played at VIFF?)

It’s a limitation of audience, to be sure; but the trade for a smaller audience is a greater freedom of expression. A man and his movie camera can go out and make a three hour treatise on a single person’s livelihood in the countryside, step out the country, and through the projector’s rays throw a light across national borders that has been cast from a common element, yet one also cast with a precision from which emerges insight, poetry, and something both human and social…

Showing a film like Fortune Teller isn’t simply cultural exchange but rather a revelation that this is a time in the history of a national cinema where there is an avid desire to record the work and lives of its people. The motivation may have changed from that of the 1920s in America, but in a way the results are similar: small people doing their own small things from which cinema expresses a dignity, beauty, and realism in its preference for exact social detail and small local observations, material interactions with the world around regular people and the jobs they do, daily struggle and hard-earned smiles. The cinema world has changed—these are no longer fiction, they are no longer coming from a place that they are also addressing as an audience—but it certainly is a relief seeing not just a reference but an honest passion to understand film in 2010 as a popular art form, a popular medium. “Popular” perhaps now meaning something different—related to populace and population rather than popularity—but something still with meaning and still attached to my favorite art of them all.”

Relevant Classroom Use

Poster for The Old Donkey (dir. Li Ruijun)

The Seventh China Independent Film Festival concluded in Nanjing on October 25, with awards given to the following narrative feature films:

First Prize: The Old Donkey, dir. Li Ruijun
Second Prize: Rivers and My Father, dir. Li Luo
Debut Prize: Piercing, dir. Liu Jian

Special Mentions:
Single Man, dir. Hao Jie
Cleaning, dir. Yuan Fei

Additionally, the following films were screened as part of the CIFF Top 10 Documentaries program:

Xue Jianqiang: Martian Syndrome
Zhang Zanbo: A Song of Love, Maybe
Qiu Jiongjiong: Madame
Mao Chenyu: Triumph of the Will
Guo Xiaolu: Once Upon a Time Proletarian
Chen Xinzhong: Zhong Sheng
Wang Qingren: Game Theory
Yang Yishu: On the Road
Zhou Hao: Cop Shop
Li Ning: Tape

CIFF organizer (and dGenerate consultant) Zhang Xianmin discusses the Festival with Christen Cornell for Artspace China.

Relevant Classroom Use

Wee Ling Soh

Soh ponders:

While we get the bleak overtone, we see the perfectly attractive models and we’re amused by its accompanying surrealist art references [e.g. Magritte's Golconda], we wonder – if a film looks better when it is paused (flawlessly-executed visuals in almost every frame), is something seriously wrong? Perhaps models just are not actors and it’s best if they stuck with their actual jobs: Modeling.

Is this the future of independent filmmaking in China?

Independent filmmakers in China make their films on shoestring budgets, scraping together whatever funds they have in pursuit of a story they feel absolutely compelled to tell.  Meanwhile, some would say that the Chinese avant garde art and video scene – not to be confused with the indie filmmaking scene – is pretty much a playground for commercial interests. It’s a subculture flush with the money and attention of high culture trendseekers and investment speculators, with artists commanding large sums for elaborate gallery installations or videos running hours on end.

One can look to Wang Bing as the symbolic fork in the road. His West of the Tracks is a landmark work that has influenced a wave of grungy, street-level observational documentary, one of the reigning hallmarks of contemporary do-it-yourself Chinese indie filmmaking. But this inspirational landmark of the indie doc scene was funded in no small part from European arts and culture sources, and it’s a work whose massive length (9 hours) forebears a conventional theatrical screening, making more sense as a series of gallery installations playing on an endless loop. Indeed, Wang’s subsequent work, like his 14 hour Crude Oil, seems increasingly tailored to a gallery setting, which is unsurprising as the funding for his work comes largely from the art world.

If the art scene is where the money is, I don’t begrudge Wang Bing or other independent filmmakers for following the money, if that’s what will sustain their work.  One of the most celebrated films in our catalog is Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s San Yuan Li, a film commissioned by the Venice Biennale and an example of how funding from the art world makes amazing, artistically innovative work possible. But looking at Yang Fudong’s video, you have to wonder how commercial interests will influence our understanding of what’s avant garde or independent:

Relevant Classroom Use

Betelnut (dir. Yang Heng)

Perhaps I’ve been spending just a bit too much time watching movies in China? I have this recurring daydream, most often when I’m watching a new Chinese film that some enterprising young director has sent me. I always watch every independent film that I receive. You never know what gems might appear unsolicited in the mail. And, even if the film isn’t so terrific, it will still be a useful index of all sorts of interesting trends: it might reveal what young filmmakers in China are filming, how they are looking at the world around them, or, at least, what they think people like me want to see.

The daydream, or perhaps it’s a fantasy, is this. There exists, down some dusty grey hutong alleyway of Beijing, a Chinese Indie Director’s Discount Emporium. You want to make a film? Step right in and assemble your movie at bargain prices. The shelving on the left is stocked with cast members: long-haired village boys, out of school, drifting aimlessly. At the back is a set of grainy, dusty, brown-grey village-scapes, ready to be populated by said drifters. To the right, useful equipment. Some tripods, but with a restriction: they must be set up at least 50 metres from the subjects being filmed. Right beside is a very long long shelf, holding 3 minute, 10 minute, even 20 minute-long takes, offered for a steal at family-sized package prices. Alternatively, you could go for deep discount on little DV cams, with the proviso that, held close to the subjects, they be shaken as vigorously as possible. The dialogue shelves in the centre are threadbare: screenplays for rent are all dialogue-light. And, off in a corner, is a shelf labelled “Prostitutes”. It’s over-loaded, with a three-for-the-price-of-one sale.

This may seem a bit mean. But the people I’m making fun of here, in fact, are international film programmers like me (I select Chinese language films for the Vancouver International Film Festival), not the filmmakers themselves. It seems that many of us (my colleagues from other film festivals, and wouldn’t exclude myself) sometimes seem to select films armed with a checklist of “East Asian art film attributes”, the things that populate the shelves of our hutong indie shop. Who can blame a young director from China, who, with little or no chance of gaining any return on his or her investment within his own country, tries to design a film to suit those foreigners who pay the bills, fund post production, and just might offer an overseas distribution deal?

It’s too easy to choose more of what you already know, and it’s too easy to train audiences (I should say, to educate audiences) to expect a certain kind of film experience from a certain brand of national cinema. It’s something that I and my colleagues need constantly to be on guard against. After all, the joy, and if I may say so, the social value of the work I do come from constantly expanding, not restricting, the range of cinema that audiences can see. We should be in the business of opening wider the gates, or even blasting the gates apart altogether. Not honing and strengthening them to exquisite perfection.

Little Moth (dir. Peng Tao)

Fortunately, the Chinese indie brand is still going quite strong. In fact, each of the items in my indie shop has current exponents who give them fresh power and exciting possibilities.

Peng Tao uses that browny-grey palette to devastatingly expressive effect in Little Moth (Xue chan, 2007). His tightly framed hand-held camera rattles along behind the film’s desperately poor characters, pinning them against the rough, impoverished, desaturated urban environments where they are trapped. The colourless futures we see are all that they can imagine for themselves.

As for that distant tripod, I can think of no better exponent than Yang Heng with his debut Betelnut (Binglang, 2006) and this year’s Sun Spots (Guang ban, 2009). The tension he exposes between solitary youths and the wide spaces of their rural environments comes from classical symmetries, balances Yang designs in his distantly framed images. He shows how expressive and powerful a camera set far back from the action can be.

Oxhide (dir. Liu Jiayin)

If you want to see long takes that sing, Liu Jiayin’s brilliant series Oxhide I and Oxhide II (Niupi I and Niupi II) are state of the art examples. She knows how to make time itself the subject, and the director, of each shot: she stretches and repurposes cinema in ways no one else yet has imagined.

The girlfriends-turned-prostitutes by the long-haired drifters trope? Well, perhaps that one is due for a little rest.

What’s really eye-opening, finally, is when I see films that push these conventions into new territory: Wanma Caidan’s The Search, which screened at both the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals, uses a long shots to heartbreaking effect. Even more exciting are films that forego the conventions completely. To take one example, the very young director Wu Haohao has already made a series of documentaries (Kun 1 Action!, Criticizing China, Forbid Silence, all from 2008) that tear up every convention possible, harnessing the boldness and audacity of youth to make movies say new things in wild new ways.

Relevant Classroom Use

In addition there will be other discussions and presentations on Chinese independent cinema (including one by yours truly on behalf of dGenerate); there’s even a “Young Movie Critics” training course on tap.

Yang Jin‘s Er Dong, a dGenerate Films catalog title, is among the titles participating in the Feature Film Competition. Other dGenerate directors who have films in the festival are Ying Liang (Good Cats) and Zhao Dayong (Rough Poetry).

Shelly Kraicer profiled the CIFF on his virtual tour of the Chinese independent film circuit. He wrote, “the festival cultivates a real sense of intellectual energy and ferment.”

Main program of films follows after the break.

Feature Films Competition
Lou Ye: Spring Fever
Peng Lei: Panda Candy
Wang Liren: Tattoo
Xu Ruotao: Rumination
Yang Jin: Er Dong
Ying Liang: Good Cats
Zhang Ming: Bride
Zhang Feng: Not a Bad Brat
Zhang Jianchi: White Dragonfly
Zheng Yi: Woodpecker

Special Feature
Li Hongqi: Golden Week
Zhao Ye: Jalainur

Student Session
Chen Qiguang (Hong Kong): Save the Kid
Guo Zhen (Hong Kong): Mom Goes to Work
Lei Lei: Pear or ET + Universe Candy Floss
Li Xing: Wedding Banquet
Qin Panpan: An Lan
Sheng Xintian: Wu Yi
Liu Ying: Ema, Ema
Su Zhexian (Taiwan): Street Dance Craze
Wu Xiao: Elegy of the Antitheist
Wu Yaqin: Garden
Xi Xueqing: Secret Channel

CIFF Top Ten Documentary List
Lin Xin: Schoolmates
Lin Zhizhan (Taiwan): Red Grain
Mao Chenyu: Xi Mao’s Universe
Tao Huaqiao: Arhat
Wang Xuebo: Bangke from the Mansi Village
Wei Ating: You and Me
Xu Tong: Fortune Telling
Zhao Xun: Two Seasons
Zhang Jingwei: KJ
Zhang Tianhui: Farewell, Beijing

CIFF Top Ten Experimental Films
Chen Xuegang: Me
Cheng Ran: Rock Pigeon
Gao Shiqiang: Oxygen Sick
Liang Yue: Lady, Lady
Liu Yonghong + Liu Zhiyong: Can you play with me
Mei Jian: Live Force
Na Yingyu: Our Master is Gone
Yang Li: Wonderland
Zhao Dayong: Rough Poetry
Zhao Yu: Crystal

Relevant Classroom Use

Rayns: “In the last 10 years or so… nearly all of the creative energy in [mainland] Chinese cinema has come from the independent sector, from kids working outside the film industry.”

This means that when there is an event, like the devastating Sichuan earthquake last year, filmmakers like Du Haibin, “who has always been drawn to the marginal, the dispossessed and people who are socially at the bottom of the ladder,” said Rayns, rush off to film those events.

“What he came up with is very different from what the news organizations did,” said Rayns. “He’s not going to launch into a violent attack on the authorities for shoddy building standards, but he very clearly shows the nature of the problem as it hit the region. Why did so many school buildings collapse? Why were so many kids among the victims?”

This year, for the first time, Rayns split the task of identifying Asian films for the VIFF with Shelly Kraicer, who spends a large part of the year based in Beijing. While Rayns focused on films from Japan, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia, Kraicer kept tabs on Chinese films out of mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, plus Malaysia and Singapore.

The Search by Tibetan director Pema Tseden is another Chinese pick that Rayns describes as “aggressively Tibetan” without being overtly political. Notably, it’s only the second feature to be made by a Tibetan crew and cast inside China. In the past, most films about Tibet have been “done by Han Chinese, so there is quite a long history of rather folksy movies about the exoticism of Tibet,” said Rayns.

The Search tells the casting of a traditional Tibetan opera and it, “of course, it reveals other things about Tibet, the status of Tibetan culture, the threats to it as it gets harder to find people to perform this stuff because the traditions are dying out,” said Rayns.

Wu Haohao, a young director from China, is also on Rayns’ list of recommendations. “He is in his early 20s. Very headstrong. Very full of himself, but he is different from the others,” said Rayns. “He does personal essay films, which are very critical about his contemporaries and the political apathy of his generation. He’s quite provocative. He’s nothing like Michael Moore, but he is at the centre of his own documentary in all his flagrant nudity.”

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

You can listen to this 15 minute interview by clicking the .mp3 link below:

Listen to Richard Pena on Chinese Independent Cinema

Relevant Classroom Use