Together (dir. Zhao Liang)

Chinese Radio International broadcast a segment profiling Zhao Liang’s new documentary Together. The film will screen at the 35th Hong Kong International Film Festival. You can listen to the program here.

Together is a behind-the-scenes documentary of Chinese director Gu Changwei’s upcoming feature film A Tale of Magic (formerly known as Life is a Miracle), which alludes to the discrimination faced by HIV/AIDS patients in China.  Zhao documented the interactions of the cast and crew as they came face-to-face with the disease during the production.

Film critic and blogger Dan Edwards discusses the film in the radio program:

“When you talk about HIV in China, it’s very easy to remain at an abstract level and not relate to what this means for individual people on a daily level… but hearing some of these stories about the gross discrimination and isolation that a lot of HIV sufferers face in China would have been quite a revelation.”

Edwards has written extensively and interviewed Zhao about the film. You can read more from him on his blog Screening China.

Watch Zhao Liang answer questions at the international premiere of Together at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Zhao Liang’s acclaimed feature Crime and Punishment is available in the dGenerate catalog.

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Using (dir. Zhou Hao)

Southern Metropolis Daily has a proud reputation as one of the very few newspapers in mainland China with real teeth, so it’s perhaps not surprising the paper’s ranks have also produced such sharp-eyed documentarian as Zhou Hao. Zhou’s stories focus on minor, charismatic players in contemporary Chinese society, honing in on small stories to make broader points about various social milieux, from the world of heroin addition in Using (2008) to small town politics in The Transition Period (2009). More intriguingly, Zhou’s films also highlight the uncertain, often fraught relationship between documentary makers and their subjects.

Using

Using opens among a group of emaciated junkies living under a highway overpass, a concrete island home in a sea of traffic. The casual presence of death is immediately apparent as we see Ah Long, a man in his 30s, chatting on the phone with a family member of an ailing addict. “He won’t last long,” Ah Long states bluntly. “I’m saying you should come to see him… You can come and have a last look…”

Drug addiction is not an issue that gets much coverage in the Chinese media, and it’s hard to know how widespread the problem is in China. Using delves into this murky world in the southern city of Guangzhou, tracing the friendship between Zhou Hao and a heroin addict named Ah Long over the course of several years.

After the opening sequence, we follow Ah Long and others back to a derelict structure beside a railway track. The uneasy, distrustful camaraderie among the drug users is immediately familiar to anyone who has encountered heroin addicts in reality, or seen their zoned out expressions on screen before. In fact, one of the striking aspects of Using is the way it shows heroin to be a cultural leveler, creating subcultures of users who always tell the same lies to themselves and those around them, to feed a habit they know will destroy them. The language of addiction, it seems, is the same in any culture.

In this sense, Using adds little to previous films about the culture surrounding heroin, apart from revealing its existence in present-day China. The film’s emotional nexus, however, lies elsewhere, in the knotty relationship between filmmaker Zhou Hao on the one hand, and Ah Long and his girlfriend Ah Jun on the other. The on-again off-again nature of their “friendship” is established straight after the film’s introductory sequence, when inter-titles tell us police cleared out the derelict building shortly after Zhou Hao filmed there. Ah Long disappears for six months and Zhou Hao gives up hope of ever seeing him again – until Ah Long calls out of the blue and they are reunited over a meal.

It’s a pattern repeated throughout the film, as Ah Long disappears time and again only to call Zhou Hao a few months later and tell the director he is “his one true friend” – before asking for money. After one prolonged disappearance the director finds Ah Long and his girlfriend Ah Jun living in a room shared with a puppy. Ah Jun asks the filmmaker for RMB 500, and he grudgingly hands over 200, saying firmly “This is all I have.” The couple laugh, as Ah Long comments, “I told her you’d only have 200 yuan… I said there’s no way you would bring 500 yuan here.”

It’s clear the filmmaker is being played for cash, but Zhou Hao is no fool – and neither is Ah Long. At one point Ah accuses the director of feeding his habit so that Zhou can coolly observe the results through his lens. But just as Zhou is repeatedly drawn back into Ah Long’s orbit by his fascination with the junky’s world, Ah Long clearly enjoys the attention and validity the camera lends his otherwise rather squalid existence. As this web of interdependence grows increasingly tangled, it becomes less and less clear who is “using” who.

Towards the end of the film Ah Long’s girlfriend, Ah Jun, tells the filmmaker that many of the most dramatic scenes we’ve witnessed – including Ah Long coughing up blood after he’s supposedly swallowed razor blades – were simply staged to extract money. “You never thought his acting was just a little too good?” she asks pointedly. And it’s true – Ah Long is quite a performer. And like all actors he seeks out an audience, just as director Zhou Hao wants to be on hand to capture his best moments.

It’s this blurring of truth and lies, calculated drama and a very real addiction, that makes Using such an emotionally discomforting experience. Like the filmmaker, we want to switch off but we just can’t look away.

Inevitably Ah Long’s addiction leads him to a grim dead end, and takes him places Zhou Hao’s camera can’t follow. After narrating the final stages of the addict’s downward spiral, Zhou Hao leaves us with a final flashback that perfectly captures the uncertain boundaries that have framed his friendship with Ah Long throughout the film. As the addict edges along a dangerously high wall beside a railway track, he looks down at Zhou filming from the safety of ground level. “I could jump down,” he says jokingly. “You’d get your perfect shot.”

With a final wave, Ah Long climbs down onto a side road and leaves Zhou Hao filming from the far side of the wall. As he disappears into the distance we’re left to ponder – have we been observers of his fate, or accomplices to his decline?

The Transition Period

A quite different, though also quietly reflexive film, The Transition Period follows a county-level party secretary during his last months in office. From the opening scenes we get a sense of the way personal relations stand in for institutional procedures and structures in China, as the party secretary personally meets with peasants whose homes have been forcibly demolished, dolling out ad hoc compensation in response to their complaints. Later we see local business luminaries visiting the secretary’s office and coyly ask for favours while inviting him to dinner.

The secretary’s domain is in Henan, a land-locked province in central China where the economy lags far behind the coastal regions. Although the area has a county chief, as at all levels of government in China, it’s the party secretary who holds real power.

As well as the cronyism that infects China’s corridors of power, The Transition Period lays bare the repressive dynamics of the nation’s top-down power structures, as the central character informs a meeting of township-level party secretaries that if anything “happens” on their patch, they will take the blame.

It’s this vague yet pervasive emphasis on “stability,” combined with a weak system of law, that leads to some of the worst abuses by authorities in China. Low-level cadres tend to follow a deeply-instilled instinct to suppress any sign of social disturbance, lest it reflect badly on their superiors and undermine their own career prospects. The lack of legal means by which citizens can resolve conflicts means ordinary people and the authorities are in a constant dance of negotiation, appeasement and repression, that puts as much strain on cadres as it does ordinary citizens.

One protracted sequence illustrates how these dynamics play out on the ground, as the party secretary’s car is surrounded by an angry mob of builders who have not been paid by a private contractor working on a government job. Despite the crowd’s fury, the secretary skillfully defuses the situation by agreeing to see a small delegation of workers at the local government office.

The representatives are brought to a meeting room where they are greatly outnumbered by officials and silenced by the intimidation of their surrounds. The secretary berates them for causing a disturbance and promises severe repercussions if they instigate another protest. At the same time he promises to obtain their wages, which he does later in the film by threatening the contractor.

Director Zhou Hao

Although the episode reveals the unrelenting pressure placed on officials by China’s haphazard system of administration, it also underscores why China’s political system is so resistant to reform. Any meaningful strengthening of institutional procedures would require a separation of powers, threatening the very basis of the immense arbitrary power wielded by local cadres.

In a disturbing indication of the extent to which this power is taken for granted, the party secretary quite deliberately flaunts his influence and privileges for Zhou’s camera. We see him planning his own succession in cahoots with other officials, openly making a mockery of Beijing’s talk of “intra-Party democracy.” Only when the discussion moves on to the exchange of large sums of money does he casually ask Zhou to turn off his camera.

Although such scenes indicate serious corruption is rampant, other abuses of power seen in the film are simply puerile. Like most officials in China, a considerable slice of the party secretary’s working life seemingly comprises publicly-funded banquets fueled by copious amounts of alcohol. On one occasion he celebrates the birthday of a local Western businessman by becoming utterly inebriated and happily smearing the businessman’s face, as well as his own, with cake.

Another stiff meeting with a visiting Taiwanese business delegation is followed by an inevitable drinking session, in which one of the Taiwanese drunkenly slurs down the camera, “Business and government want the same thing. First: POWER! Second: MONEY! They sound almost the same in Chinese – the two are indivisible!” The speech neatly sums up the twin drivers of China’s particularly avaricious system of state-controlled capitalism.

Complicity with the Camera

The most disquieting aspect of Zhou’s cinema is not so much what he shows us – though this is often disturbing enough – but his subject’s willingness to act as they do for his camera. Far from being a fly-on-the-wall observer, Zhou deploys his lens as a kind of proxy audience, encouraging his subjects to play heightened versions of themselves for the screen. The characteristics his subjects chose to reveal speak reams about the particular social worlds they inhabit, from the petty abuses of power infusing the political realm of The Transition Period, to the insecurities and escapist desires underlying addiction in Using.

Even as the camera’s gaze lays bear the contours of these characters’ worlds, it calls into question our own complicity as consumers of their on-screen behavior. For all their willingness to perform for the camera, these are not actors – they are real people, whose actions have real consequences for the world around them. We may find their actions amusing, titillating or even abhorrent, but their eagerness to act as they do never lets us forget that we tolerate a world that makes these scenes possible.

Dan Edwards is a critic and journalist who contributes regularly to RealTime and The Beijinger. In 2011 he will be commencing a PhD project on the Chinese independent documentary movement.

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Together (dir. Zhao Liang)

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A scene from Together (dir. Zhao Liang)

This week on dGenerate we will be featuring articles related to Zhao Liang’s acclaimed documentary Crime and Punishment to coincide with the screening of his films at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Click here for more information on the screenings.

Dan Edwards reports:

Zhao Liang is undoubtedly one of the leading lights of the independent Chinese documentary scene, and in the past I’ve written about his films Petition and Crime and Punishment… I was surprised to hear… that Zhao had just completed a film about HIV in China that had been passed for official release.

Indeed it is remarkable that the director of probing documentaries depicting Chinese police interrogation tactics on the North Korean border and the suppression of petitioners in the capital of Beijing now has the opportunity to make a film that can screen publicly in China. Zhao’s new film Together was able to be made as a companion piece Life Is a Miracle, a mainstream feature about a couple suffering from an illness suggesting HIV, with megastars Zhang Ziyi and Aaron Kwok directed by Gu Changwei. Together documents Zhao’s efforts to reach out to the community of HIV carriers and enlist several to appear in Gu’s film. Zhao’s film even has mainstream coverage in the Chinese press, as evidenced by this feature in China Daily.

Dan Edwards gives his first impressions of the film, plus an interview with Zhao Liang, on his site Screening China. Zhao reflects:

Before the shoot I had no knowledge at all of HIV – I gradually learned through preparing and shooting the film. Actually the Chinese are a very tolerant people. The discrimination is because people lack knowledge and mainstream media stigmatises the disease.

Read more at Screening China.

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This article was originally published November 4, 2010.

by Dan Edwards

Zhao Liang provided one of the most heartrending Chinese documentaries of recent times last year with Petition, an epic work about petitioners living on the fringes of China’s capital. It’s much rarer, however, to see stories about those enforcing the rules in the People’s Republic – the nature of Chinese state institutions means access is usually impossible. Which makes Zhao’s earlier film Crime and Punishment (Zui Yu Fa, 2007) all the more extraordinary, providing as it does an intimate snapshot of life inside a People’s Armed Police (PAP) station.

As Zhao explained in an interview earlier this year, he was only able to gain access to the station, located on the Chinese-Korean border in the remote northeast, because “these people are politically more naive and less politically savvy than their Beijing counterparts.” Zhao does not just exploit the officers’ naivety to expose their petty abuses of power however – the uniformed community provides a microcosm of the broader social structures informing the exercise of state power in contemporary China.

Crime and Punishment opens with the officers patiently folding their mattresses to form neat, identical piles on their beds. This extended sequence not only speaks of the conformist monotony of military life (the armed police are a paramilitary group organized similarly to the army), but also the thin line that separates those enforcing the law in China from those on the receiving end of the state’s coercive power. Like prisoners these men eat, work and sleep together in bare, whitewashed dormitories, kept at arm’s length from the townsfolk outside.

Dogs whimper on the soundtrack as we cut to a shot of the landscape surrounding the station, a beautiful but harsh snow-covered scene beside a river. This is Dongbei – the northeast – where wintertime temperatures can plunge as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Inside the station grounds two guard dogs struggle against overly short leads, only to be repeatedly pulled up by their necks. In the yard young PAP personnel stand in lines on parade. It’s an obvious parallel – too obvious – and only with the film’s final sequence does it become clear Zhao is developing a much more complex analogy than initially appears.

After this introductory sequence we follow the officers as they go about their duties, taking a call from a mentally disturbed man who claims he has found a body in his apartment, and raiding an illegal gambling den. After they arrest an alleged pickpocket in a market, we see the man questioned and casually beaten, first with kicks and punches, later with a leather strap.

More surprising than the offhanded violence employed by the officers is their sheer incompetence. Although the film never spells out what differentiates the PAP from regular police, their military-style garb and an early scene in which a school principal praises their superior response time makes it clear this is an elite security unit. Despite their elevated status, as the film progresses it becomes embarrassingly evident these young men lack proper training or even an awareness of basic legalistic procedures.

The alleged pickpocket, for example, is obviously unable to understand most of what is said to him, and his speech is largely unintelligible. After a comically inept “interrogation” the officers simply resort the beating him up. “Without a confession we can’t bring him to trial,” an exasperated policeman explains to Zhao Liang as the suspect is dragged away. None of the police appear to register that the man is either deaf or mentally impaired, and hence incapable of responding to their questions. Eventually we hear one of the officers admit to his superior that they are unable to communicate with the suspect and have absolutely no evidence against him. He’s later released without charge.

Later we see the police bring in an elderly farmer caught collecting scrap without a permit, a classic example of the petty bureaucratic regulations that govern every aspect of life in China. The average person just ignores most of these rules most of the time, creating problems when the police decide to arbitrarily enforce them. The farmer’s son nicely sums up the attitude of many when the old man calls him from the station for assistance: “Fuck those fuckers!” the son explodes. “All they do is dick around… those motherfuckers!” Unfortunately for the old man, his son’s diatribe is loud enough for the officers to hear.

After showing us the bumbling pettiness of much of the officers’ work, Crime and Punishment takes a more challenging turn when a group of young farmers are caught with an illegal load of timber. After the farmers are subject to the seemingly de rigueur beatings, a pair of officers accompanies one of them back to his village to collect evidence and photograph the stumps of illegally logged trees.

In the village the officers are confronted by the man’s extended family living in a single cramped farmhouse. The suspect’s living conditions clearly touch a chord, and as they climb the hill behind the village to photograph the cut-down trees, a strange camaraderie develops between the farmer and police. “I barely made 4,000 yuan this year [less than USD 600],” the farmer explains. “I work hard all year round to send my kid to school and we’re still eating up the family savings. The house isn’t big enough – you saw it. My dad lives in that little lean-to. An old man shouldn’t have to live like that…” The officers make sympathetic noises and say they’ll ask their captain to minimize the man’s punishment.

Having established this link between the officers and the peasants they police, Zhao moves to the PAP’s annual “demobilization,” which sees many of the young recruits standing down after two years on the job. Only a handful continue to an academy where they are made into PAP officers, while the rest return to civilian life in the towns and villages they came from. One of the young recruits becomes drunk after being told he will be discharged, crying bitterly as he lays bare the corruption of the system: “If I had the 50,000 yuan to pay the bribe I know I’d get into the academy,” he says to his colleague. “History is written by the victors. If you lose you’re just a loser. But if you win, even if you win by bribes or dirty tricks, you’re the winner, you’re the man.”

Although the slim possibility of a lifetime of power and privilege is dangled in front of these young men, the majority are discarded by a system that perpetuates itself through an endless supply of eager recruits desperate to escape the impoverished conditions we’ve seen outside. There are no heroes or villains in this story, just young men caught up in a cycle that ultimately keeps most of them as powerless as the villagers they lord over.

From here Zhao cuts to the tethered dogs at the back of the station that we’ve seen fed throughout the film. As the smaller dog looks on, the larger animal is unceremoniously slaughtered with a knife to the heart. Only now does it become clear these animals are not guard dogs or even pets – they are raised by the police to be sacrificed for the pot. The scene is as unnerving as it is unexpected, and made all the more disturbing by the parallel with the young recruits’ fate.

His analogy complete, Zhao returns to the policemen’s mattresses folded in neat piles, now accompanied by the discarded insignia and caps of the demobilized recruits. As he rounds off the film’s neatly circular structure, Zhao leaves us with one final, tantalizingly open-ended image of peasants carrying household furniture across a snow-covered landscape. In the background a Christian Church dominates the scene – a sign of another power steadily growing in China’s countryside? A hint that farmers are increasingly turning to beliefs outside the morally bankrupt framework of the state? Zhao leaves us with a question rather than an answer, and an invitation to continue interrogating what we have seen after the end credits roll.

Dan Edwards writes for The Beijinger and Real Time Arts, among other publications. His own blog is Screening China.

Crime and Punishment is distributed by dGenerate Films. Find out more from our catalog.

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Filmmaker Ai Xiaoming filming sculpture by Yan Zhengxue (photo: Dan Edwards)

On his blog Screening China, Dan Edwards reports on his meeting with Ai Xiaoming, professor at Sun Yat Sen University and the maker of numerous investigative documentaries. In addition to interviewing Ai, Edwards has the special experience of following her at work, as she visits the home of dissident artist Yan Zhengxue, who was released from a three-year prison sentence in 2009. Edwards writes the following on Ai’s documentary filmmaking technique and philosophy:

I was impressed by how quickly Ai Xiaoming cut to the chase with her work, which seemingly relied on no preparation – she simply grabbed her camera and started rolling. It seems the camera for her is simply a tool – perhaps “a weapon” to quote another local filmmaker Ou Ning – which Ai Xiaoming uses to capture her subject’s testimonies. She appeared uninterested in questions of style or aesthetics. When I chatted to her later that night about the decade Zhao Liang spent filming the predicament of petitioners in Beijing for his documentary Petition, Ai Xiaoming commented that she could never spend so long on a project. “Our aim is to change things,” she said firmly, which I took to mean she prefers to get stories into the public domain as quickly as possible in order to try and effect change – or at least contribute to ongoing campaigns.

Yan Zhengxue's sculpture of Lin Zhao (photo: Dan Edwards)

Edwards also writes about Yan Zhengxue’s life and work, including the events leading to Yan’s arrest and an account of his near-death experience in prison. Attention is paid to a couple of sculptures of young women activists who were imprisoned and executed during the Cultural Revolution. One is Lin Zhao, who spent eight years in prison writing essays and poetry, using her own blood as ink. Lin Zhao is the subject of Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, a documentary directed by Hu Jie, a frequent collaborator of Ai Xiaoming. The film investigates the suppressed history of Lin Zhao, a figure largely unknown to many Chinese but whose tragic life story is an inspiration to many activists today. Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul is considered a landmark in investigative documentary in China, especially in breaking the taboos of China’s recent past.

dGenerate is pleased to announce that it will be distributing three of Hu Jie’s films: Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, Though I Am Gone, and East Wind Farm Camp (aka National East Wind Farm). All three films were included in “Sixty Years of Unsanctioned Memories in the People’s Republic,” a list of films dealing with forgotten or suppressed histories and marginal, dispossessed social groups in China.  It is our hope that such important films, including Ai Xiaoming’s, will become more accessible to audiences around the world.

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Zhao Tao in I Wish I Knew (dir. Jia Zhangke)

Published as part of Dong Week at dGenerate Films, a series of articles on Jia Zhangke and the art world in China.

At RealTime Arts, Dan Edwards reviews Jia Zhangke’s new film I Wish I Knew. Some highlights:

There is a spectre haunting Jia Zhangke’s recent work: the spectre of time, of memories being displaced and history erased… But whereas Still Life and 24 City implicitly asked where a nation’s emotional, ethical and philosophical centre lies when so much of its heritage has been destroyed, Jia’s new documentary I Wish I Knew attempts to answer this question by reclaiming history from the ground up…

The contested nature of Shanghai’s past is highlighted not only through personal remembrances from various political and historical perspectives, but also through the filmmaker’s reflection on the ways in which the city’s life has been represented on screen. Shanghai has long been the centre of China’s film industry, and even when Hong Kong dominated Asian cinema, its industry was nurtured by Shanghai refugees who had fled the mainland in the wake of the Communist takeover…

I Wish I Knew resists simply positing an alternative narrative to what appears in mainland Chinese history books, or validating the version of Shanghai’s past told in Taiwan. Instead, the film redefines the very notion of history in China by refusing all singular, linear accounts of Shanghai’s development. For millennia succeeding dynasties rewrote or simply wiped clean what went before in China in order to shore up their own power, a tradition the Communists have pursued with violent determination. In contrast, Jia’s film gives voice to the vanquished as well as the victors, marking out history as an ever-evolving, always disputed discourse comprising a multitude of competing voices.

Read the full review. Dan Edwards’ personal blog devoted to Chinese cinema is Screening China.

There are many other reviews and resources related to I Wish I Knew and Jia Zhangke online.  Here are just a few:

On I Wish I Knew:

Official Trailer:

Ken Kwan Ming Hao, in The China Beat:

In his new film I Wish I Knew, a documentary on Shanghai, Jia Zhangke recreates once again, after a detour of sorts with Useless and24 City, that wonderful tension between the biographical and the historical, the primal impetus of his art, that had made Platform,The World, and Still Life, his best films, so memorable. Jia is different from all other well-known mainland Chinese directors, be they of the 5th or 6th generation — his is a singular sensibility that is aware of but not chained to the social-political, which to him are meaningful only to the extent that they are constraints to be transcended and transformed. In an environment of habitual politicization and cognitive rigidity, the sensibility espoused in Jia’s films is liberating.

On Jia Zhangke:

Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2010

“Jia Zhangke: Filmmaker of the Decade?” Article by Andrew Chan for the L Magazine

Great Directors Profile on Senses of Cinema by dGenerate’s Kevin Lee, February 2003

Feature profile on China.org.cn, media portal owned by the Chinese government, published December 5, 2003. This may be the first mainstream media acknowledgement of Jia Zhangke in the Chinese mainstream media. Since then, all of Jia Zhangke’s films have passed official state approval

“The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return,” essay by Jia Zhangke

Video essay recorded by Evan Ossnos of the New Yorker

Video of Jia Zhangke at the March 2010 MoMA retrospective, interviewed by Howard Feinstein and Kevin Lee

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Directors Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai and Lou Ye at the Beijing premiere of Wang's Chongqing Blues (photo courtesy of Screening China)

We’ve been following Dan Edwards‘ blog Screening China for the past several weeks, and it’s quickly shaping up to be an important source for reviews on the latest in Chinese film, especially from the indie/arthouse side. Dan, who is based in Beijing, writes for The Beijinger and Real Time Arts, among other publications. We’ve been linking all year to his coverage of our films and filmmakers: a review of Ghost Town;  an interview with Liu Jiayin; a profile on documentary filmmakers; and a recap of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. He’s contributed a lot in a relatively short time, and it’s good to be able to access his content on his blog (which, ironically, is blocked in China).

Here are some recent highlights from his blog:

From his review of Yang Rui’s Crossing the Mountain:

It’s a brave first feature (Yang has apparently previously made documentaries) and at it’s best Crossing the Mountain allows us to sink into the sense of time and space of a pre-modern society existing on the hazy edges of a rapidly modernising nation. As such, it’s a reminder of cinema’s ability to not only tell a story, but transport us into a whole other way of being in the world.

From his review of Ghost Town director Zhao Dayong’s The High Life, which won two awards at HKIFF:

The High Life is a surprising, unsettling film, rich in cynical humour about the nature of power, economics and relationships in contemporary China. Following the unveiling of his acclaimed three-hour documentary Ghost Town last year at the New York Film Festival (see my article on the film for RealTime here), Zhao Dayong is rapidly establishing himself as a major rising talent in Chinese cinema.

Most recently, Dan has front-row coverage of the Beijing premiere of Wang Xiaoshuai’s new film Chongqing Blues, and reports how Jia Zhangke unintentionally upstaged the proceedings.

We look forward to ongoing reports and reviews from Dan’s blog.

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1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

In the newest issue of RealTime Arts Magazine, there is a rousing article by Dan Edwards on the significance of digital independent filmmaking in China. Here’s the opening passage:

While China’s political system remains deeply authoritarian, the country’s overwhelming size and explosive growth have opened cavernous gaps in the government’s control of culture, through which a new generation of DV-wielding documentary filmmakers has climbed.

Edwards profiles films such as Hu Jie’s In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul, Ou Ning’s Meishi Street, and Du Haibin’s 1428 (editor: The latter two are distributed by dGenerate Films). He also interviews three notable figures in the contemporary digital filmmaking scene: producer/journalist David Bandurski (Ghost Town), artist/filmmaker Ou Ning and filmmaker/journalist Hu Jie. Here are some choice quotes from each:

Bandurski: “I’ve never heard an independent filmmaker in China ask themselves, ‘Can I do this?… Independent filmmaking is the freest avenue of expression that exists in China today.”

Ou: “Before, history only had one version—by the Chinese Communist Party… Now with digital technology history has different versions.”

Hu: “I knew very little about the history of the 1950s and 60s… While making Lin Zhao I had the sense that I was feeling around in the dark. Then I found the door of history, opened it and walked through. There I found a lot of ridiculous, cruel stories that really shocked me, and that was the motivation to go further.”

Read the complete article at RealTime Arts.

Find out more about Meishi Street, 1428, and Ghost Town.

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Zhao Dayong achieves an extraordinary intimacy with his subjects, no doubt partly due to the amount of time he spent living in the town, but also through his approach to the filmmaking process. The nature of digital camera technology allowed him to work without a professional crew and instead recruit townspeople to help with the shoot. Zhao explains, “I had three people assisting me, all local villagers. For example, the truck driver who appears in part two of the film often helped me with sound recording. This way I was able to maintain close relationships with people in the village.”

At one level the townspeople of Zhiziluo are clearly victims of China’s new economic order, which has seen major coastal cities greatly enriched at the expense of rural areas. Zhao resists straightforward socio-economic analysis however, instead implying the aimless existence of the town’s inhabitants is symptomatic of a broader malaise. “Through the town I began to see and reflect on my own life”, Zhao says of his experiences shooting Ghost Town. “A process of self-reflection is, for me, the essence of filmmaking. As I was living with these people I came to realize just how uncertain their lives and fates were. The empty government buildings in which they live do not belong to them, and the fate of the place itself, of its architecture, was also in question. They were merely floating in the world, without any sense of safety and security, and their existential condition was basically no different from my own.”

Ghost Town doesn’t purport to provide solutions to the situations it depicts, but rather asks viewers to consider, along with the filmmaker and the town’s residents, how we find meaning in a world seemingly without philosophical or ideological bearings. As Zhao Dayong comments, “Film, like painting, is a method and technique of thought. All forms of creativity are rooted in this question—how to think and reflect.” The tragedy is that Chinese audiences are largely excluded from this process. Mainland television broadcasts only state-approved products and commercial cinemas are only permitted to screen licensed films, meaning documentaries like Ghost Town are rarely seen inside the People’s Republic. Fortunately for international audiences, the questions Ghost Town poses resonate far beyond China’s borders.

Read the full review at RealTime Arts.

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