Panel title: Recreating Reality: Contemporary Chinese Documentary Films

In recent years, documentary films have enjoyed unprecedented popularity with filmmakers from Taiwan, the PRC, and Hong Kong, who use their cameras to record and represent reality in their individual societies. This panel focuses on the themes, problematics, and/or techniques of documenting reality on the screen.

Please submit a proposal of no more than 250 words to Sylvia Lin (slin@nd.edu) by March 1, 2012. Notice of acceptance or rejection will be sent out on or before March 31, 2012.

Chair: Sylvia Li-chun Lin, University of Notre Dame Alternate Chair: Christopher Lupke, Washington State University (lupke@wsu.edu)

Relevant Classroom Use

Shu Haolun's "No. 89 Shimen Road" won the top prize at CIFF, but wasn't shown on Awards Night.

The Nanjing-based China Independent Film Festival (28 October-1 November 2011), unlike the Beijing Independent Film Festival described previously, benefited from a substantial degree of official and semi-official “cover”. Unlike BIFF, there is a certain amount of practical compromise with official bodies and officially approved cinema: purity isn’t such an issue.  Co-sponsors include the Nanjing University School of Journalism and Communication, The Communication University of China (Nanjing) and the RCM Museum of Modern Art. The second day of CIFF includes a forum attended by local propaganda department officials. A sidebar of the festival (nicknamed the “Longbiao Section” for the dragon-headed insignia that appears at the beginning of all officially approved film prints in China) included screenings in a luxurious commercial cinema of several films that that are strictly speaking non-independent (i.e. censor-approved) but are made in a spirit of independence. These films would not appear at BIFF, for example, but might show later in official venues like Beijing’s Broadway Cinematheque MOMA, where approved “arthouse cinema” (i.e. non-commercial) finds a refuge in Beijing.

The core of CIFF, though, consists of four sections of new “unapproved” films: the feature film competition; a carefully curated set of documentary features — split in two, a “Top 10 Documentaries of the Year” section, and a set of new documentaries (the next ten best?); 2 sets of short fiction films; and two programmes of experimental films. Other sidebars included four films from Caochangdi Workstation’s Folk Memory Project and a Goethe Institute-sponsored set of films from the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.

Pema Tseden's "Old Dog" was screened in place of "No. 89 Shimen Road"

As with BIFF, CIFF’s selection of new features was problematic: there has been a worrying dearth of excellent, festival-worthy new Chinese indie fiction features the past year and a half (with a few notable exceptions: in particular a mini flowering of Tibetan language features led by Pema Tseden and Sonthar Gyal). And I think the awards reflected this. The jury (directors Wu Wenguang & Zhang Ming, NYU professor Angela Zito, novelist Sun Ganlu, and curator/critic Li Xianting) gave their Grand Prize to Shanghai director Shu Haolun’s bold first fiction feature No. 89 Shimen Road. That film’s direct evocation of the June 4 1989 Tiananmen protest movement, however, may have caused a slight programming hitch. The winning competition film is usually given a final prominent screening following the awards ceremony. This time, CIFF replaced it, for “technical reasons”, with one of the Jury Prize winners: Pema Tseden’s very fine Old Dog. The other jury prize winner was Wang Chao’s welcome return to independent filmmaking Celestial Kingdom, a rather conceptual work of fiction infused with a kind of cold moral fury at Chinese society’s moral collapse.

Though there were some stunning experimental features (expect to see a few at prominent international film festivals coming soon), most of the action and controversy revolved around the new documentaries. This is where heart and soul of Chinese indie filmmaking lives today. There is what one could call a mainstream school of Chinese “realistic” documentaries — let’s call them ultra-realistic docs — that dominates today, both in film festivals in China and overseas, and that preoccupies the academic, theoretical, critical discussion that has flourished around Chinese documentary filmmaking.

Briefly (and I know I’m oversimplifying, but I plan to write more extensively on this later), this school is derived from direct cinema, under the aegis of the cinemas of Frederick Wiseman and Ogawa Shinsuke. These filmmakers strive for a seemingly transparent, so-called direct representation of “truth” and “reality”, unmediated by authorial (i.e subjective) intervention. Their inspiration can be historical, archival or ethnographic, with filmmakers immersing themselves for months or even years in the lives of their subjects, then emerging with often very long documentaries that transform their experiences into cinema with minimal “subjective” distortions. Issues of ethics then emerge: the relative positions of the filmmaker and subject (are filmmakers intellectuals looking down on grassroots subjects from a position of “superiority”?); issues of consent and (mutual, explicit, endorsed) exploitation; the ethics of representation of the other; and the rights of audiences, directors, subjects, and so-called experts to challenge all these things. A refreshingly different school, recently activated in Chinese indie doc circles and in evidence at this year’s CIFF, takes documentaries as strictly personal, autobiographical, even prima facie solipsistic texts, and films and edits accordingly, highlighting the presence of the filmmaker and the interaction between what’s in front of and who’s behind the camera. This obviates a host of problems outlined above, but introduces its own very different issues of aesthetic criteria, social relevance, and moral obligation.

The filmmakers' declaration posted at CIFF (photo: Cinemascope Magazine)

These issues boiled over in a striking way at CIFF. As I reported in Cinemascope, a seminar on documentary ethics, attended by theoreticians, critics, and filmmakers, drew the lines, as directors struck back (verbally, though forcefully) at the academics for attempting to control the discourse around their films. The next day, we had something like a dazibao moment: dazibao are literally “big character posters”, like the kind Chinese Maoist youth used to use to denounce their counterrevolutionary elders 40 years ago or, perhaps more to the point, like the posters that appeared denouncing lack of democratic progress at the Democracy Wall during the so-called “Beijing Spring” in late December 1978. Many of the documentary directors, along with festival staff and audience members, worked to produce a two page declaration rebutting what they saw as an unwelcome academic hegemony over their art. The manifesto (titled Shamans · Animals) was posted outside the closing ceremony hall and distributed by hand (I translated the document into English at Cinemascope). And the controversy continues: someone else will have to summarize the final chapter of this continuing debate. Those of us attending the CIFF closing ceremony cum late-night party could see, through a glass door, an intense meeting taking place in an adjacent room, where the filmmakers and critics were still at it, continuing to hash out and perhaps resolve some of their differences.

It’s striking to see how critically engaged cinematic discourse is with Chinese politics and culture at the present moment: when nervous, insecure officials feel the need to interfere; and where practitioners and analysts engage with anger and passion. After just a month watching movies in China, it’s hard to imagine a national cinema where the stakes are higher right now.

Relevant Classroom Use

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

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

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

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

———-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Source: The Guardian)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relevant Classroom Use

"The Transition Period" shows the inner workings of local politics in China

U.S. ambassador to China Gary Locke’s recent arrival in Beijing generated intense discussions among Chinese nationals about how Chinese civil servants compare unfavorably to their American counterparts. As reported in a September 20th article in The Wall Street Journal’s blog “China Real Time Report,” the central government and its affiliated media bodies such as the Guangming Daily and the Xinhua News Agency tried to cast aspersions over the political motives behind the U.S. government’s choice of a Chinese-American ambassador. But Chinese online netizens focused on something entirely different. After seeing photos of Locke buying his own coffee and carrying his own bags, and learning that he flew coach to China, Chinese web commentators assailed their civil servants for squandering taxpayers’ money on ridiculously extravagant meals, cars, and the like, and for shirking physical work and other chores that they consider to be below their dignity.

Zhou Hao’s 2011 documentary The Transition Period, which will be playing next Monday in Chicago’s Doc Films series on Chinese independent cinema, looks at the working life of one typical Chinese civil servant by the name of Guo Yongchang before his transfer to a new post within the Chinese government. Shot over the last three months of Guo working as the party secretary of the Committee of the Communist Party of Gushi County in Xinyang Municipality of Henan Province, this documentary presents different facets of Guo’s work as a medium- to low-level Chinese civil servant in a leading position. This article aims at laying out some groundwork in China’s political system and its political environment for first-time viewers of the documentary, as sometimes the stories in the documentary are more complicated than their presentations. (Spoilers may follow.)

Gushi County has a population of about 1.6 million and a total of 32 towns. Like every other county in China, it is governed by both its county government and county party committee, with the latter having more power over the former. You may read the translation of a popular online joke below to learn about the different roles and levels of clout of five main constituents of the Chinese government:

An eighth-grader asks her mother about the Chinese government, “What does the government do?”

“The government is like me, your mom,” she replies. “I cook for you, wash your clothes, and make your bed. I do all the hard work in this house.”

“What does the party committee do?”

“Well, the party committee is like your father,” Mom replies. “He makes all the important decisions and orders me around to carry them out.”

“What does the People’s Congress do?” the girl continues.

“The People’s Congress is like your grandpa,” Mom replies. “He strolls around with his bird cage every morning but never does anything.”

“What does the Committee of the People’s Political Consultative Conference do?”

“Well, the Committee of the People’s Political Consultative Conference is like your grandma,” Mom replies. “She complains about everything, but she has no power to change anything.”

The girl asks her last question. “Then what does the commission of discipline inspection do?”

“The commission of discipline inspection is like you,” Mom replies. “You are sheltered, clothed, and fed by all of us, but all you do is check on us.”

For Guo Yongchang, since he is the party secretary of Gushi County, he has more power than Gushi County’s County Chief Fang Bo, who belongs to the county government. This explains why at the beginning of the documentary, many people, including businessmen and petitioners, are seen to go directly to Guo’s office to elicit information, seek advice, and beg for help. At one point in the documentary, Guo likens the role of a party secretary to that of a godfather. The analogy is not a stretch in reality.

A number of instances in the documentary support this analogy. For example, Guo half-suggested half-instructed a two-man envoy about their construction project that instead of building a 26-story building, they should make it 33-story to get his approval. For another, he visited the Bureau of Letters and Calls of Gushi County and approved visitors’ requests without consulting the proper procedures used by the bureau.

In fact, the latter incident echoes Chinese Premier Wen Jiaobao’s generous donation of 10,000 yuan to a two-year-old boy suffering from leukemia. Premier Wen was said to have met the body’s poverty-stricken parents at Tianjin Train Station during an inspection trip to Tianjin in September 2009. Although both Guo and Premier Wen have helped the victims in these cases, such single acts of heroism will not bring structural changes to China’s political system.

"The Transition Period"

This is why Guo lives in contradictory terms with himself. In one of his reflective moments, he said that he supported a new policy by the standing committee of both the municipal and the provincial party committees in China, which was to handpick party officials with law degrees to join their league. He believed this to be a positive change because China should follow the rule of law, rather than the rule of people.

However, his words do not often match his actions. The biggest breach to his own words are probably the dinner parties and drinking parties that he has frequently attended. At one of the meetings, he urged the civil servants in Gushi County to help cut government spending by drinking less. According to the government report, Gushi County’s income amounted to 280 million yuan in 2008, but its spending surpassed 12 billion yuan in the same year. Yet, these reminders about frugality were never taken seriously, even by himself. Every time he was at a party, we see him emptying glasses after glasses and cups after cups of alcohol.

But as Zhou points out at the beginning of the documentary, Chinese civil servants have two major responsibilities, one being that of attracting investors. To do so, they often need to drink excessively at meals as drinking is an integral part of socialization, and deals are broached and sealed in drinking parties.

This convention inevitably applies to Guo. He confessed in a farewell party with the People’s Congress of Gushi County that he had big ambitions for Gushi when he was appointed its party secretary. He chose to socialize with businesspeople because he wanted to convince them to invest in Gushi.

In the same confession statement that Guo made in front of the retired officials, he said in tears that the work that he had done for Guishi had never been for his own career advancement. In fact, it all harmed his career. What he meant was that the central government would likely consider him a corrupt official who spent much without making a profit because Gushi’s spending far exceeded its income. However, the businesspeople he had entertained at various meals and parties thought differently. They considered Guo the best government official to work with and Gushi the best place to invest. Why? It is probably because Guo showered them with many forms of government concessions and subsidies.

Sadly, Guo’s understanding of government concessions and subsidies is rather limited. He told a story twice in the documentary to illustrate the relationship between government and businesses. The story goes that in 1958, heavy deforestation in Huzu Town of Gushi County caused a local reservoir to slowly dry out, and subsequently it stopped migrating egrets from coming. However, in the 1990s, after trees were planted back, the birds also came back. In Guo’s negotiations with businessmen, he usually offered money-related incentives as a welcome sign, be it a waiver on electricity or a generous monetary gift. If this is not an overstatement, then he seems to have naively treated trees as a metaphor for money in his story.

Yet money cannot buy everything. Local governments are supposed to bring systematic improvements to their districts, counties, etc. Human capital and infrastructure are only two examples of the areas that local governments can help improve.

Director Zhou Hao

Guo planned to leave his office before the Chinese New Year in 2009. News of his transfer naturally caused unease in the county government as well as in the municipal and provincial party committee because new officials needed to be appointed. Who would get appointed in what positions was always a potential source of resentment in the Chinese government and it could obstruct work within the government.

This can be reflected in a complaint made by Guo’s secretary. She mentioned that a civil servant working at the grassroots level did not want to be transferred to the committee of people’s political consultative conference because he would have no future there. Instead, he expressed wishes to work in the general office of the party committee or in the local labor bureau, which has become the ministry of human resource and social security today.

A complication is also involved in such transfers. Guo spoke jokingly about a personal encounter. He said that one time when he was in Beijing, a high-ranking government official met him and some others for dinner. After the meal, he saw him packing up all the food and riding off with his bicycle with many bags. Compared to the official, a county-level party secretary or a county chief lived much better materially.

It is certainly not true that all high-ranking officials are as thrifty as the one in Guo’s story. But most Chinese will agree that Chinese civil servants are not as egalitarian as Gary Locke. As some of you have probably read the following quote by Mencius: “One either does mental work or manual work. The one who does mental work rules, and the one who does manual work is being ruled.” The idea that a civil servant must not labor physically like a physical worker is deeply entrenched in the Chinese mentality. This explains why in the documentary, when the buses and cars that some officials rode got stuck in the New Year snow, they only helped with clearing the icy road begrudgingly, if they did so at all. They returned to their comfortable seats soon after making some gestures of help. County Chief Fang, who later becomes Party Secretary, even exclaims, “This is hard work!”

For the construction workers who blocked the government building of Gushi County to protest not getting paid for their hard work, they certainly have an indisputable screen image of “being ruled.” Outside the government building, they openly argue with Guo about their delayed payment. But once inside the government building, and their number reduced from a big group to a small clique of five representatives, they appear tamed, docile, and very quiet. Party Secretary Fang lambasts them for blocking the gates and obstructing government work, and he threatens them with tougher measures if they refuse to cooperate. The representatives leave with promises from Fang, though Fang seems more motivated to save his job than to help them with their problems.

For those who are curious about Guo Yongchang and want to find out more about his life, his Baidu entry states that he works at the bureau of letters and serves as an inspector now. However, he himself has been inspected by the State Bureau of Letters and Calls and the Ministry of Inspection under the State Council for corruption, and he was found to have received bribes of 740,000 yuan and an additional 10,000 USD. This may puzzle those who’ve seen the film, because in one secretly filmed scene he actually orders someone to return the money that had been sent to him as a bribe. Perhaps he returned some bribes and kept others; how he decided which to accept is left undisclosed. The reality is always more complicated than it seems.

Relevant Classroom Use

Disorder (dir. Huang Weikai) tied for most mentions in PBS' poll of essential documentaries about China

Last month the acclaimed documentary Last Train Home, about migrant laborers in China, made its US television premiere as part of the POV series on PBS. As part of the film’s online promotional efforts, POV polled several filmmakers and experts in Chinese cinema to recommend top documentaries and features about China. We were pleased to see that Disorder tied for most mentions among all films, including a recommendation by Last Train Home director Fan Lixin. Fan writes of Disorder: “A powerful and utterly honest mishmash of the most bizarre images from contemporary Chinese society, with an almost cynical sarcasm. I’ve never seen anything quite like it!”

Other documentaries receiving multiple recommendations: Petition by Zhao Liang, whose Crime and Punishment is distributed by dGenerate, and Up the Yangtze by Yung Chang (who also took part in the poll). Strangely, Blind Shaft also tied for most mentions in this “documentary” poll, even though it is a narrative feature.

Not surprisingly, Jia Zhangke was the most recommended filmmaker, with six mentions spread across five titles. His documentary Dong is distributed by dGenerate.

All the recommendations can be found at the POV website on PBS.

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.

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Mr. Zhao’s evolution from a filmmaker hounded by the government to one whom it celebrates offers a window into hard choices that face directors as they try to carve out space for self-expression in China’s authoritarian system. Like Mr. Zhao, many seek to balance their independent visions with their desires to live securely and win recognition.

Accompanying the article are two videos: one in which Zhao shares his thoughts on filmmaking in China, and another in which Ai Weiwei confronts Zhao on camera over the withdrawal of his film Petition from the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival in order to avoid political controversy.

dGenerate Films is the distributor of Zhao’s film Crime and Punishment. It can be purchased through dGenerate or Amazon, or viewed online at Amazon or Fandor.

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Ying Qian

Ying Qian is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Qian’s area of focus involves examining the evolving documentary visions in 20^th century China. She is interested in the social processes and “film thinking” that have enabled and shaped the making of documentary images, and the ways in which these images have provided framings, interventions and agencies to historical change.

Recently, Qian co-organized a conference titled “Just Images: Ethics and Chinese Documentary” at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard. We spoke with Qian about the highlights of the conference as well as her ongoing research in Chinese documentary.

dGF: Could you give a brief overview of your research? What are your specific interests within the field of documentary film study?

Ying Qian: I’m writing a dissertation on the history of Chinese documentary since the Mao era. I also write about documentary practices in the Republican period in my introduction chapter.  My interest in documentary cinema was initiated by encounters with contemporary independent documentary, and I used to make my own documentary films as well.

In my dissertation, I try to move the timeline further back. When talking about contemporary documentary, critics would point out that these films are very different from the official practices and especially from the documentary practices of an earlier era.  New documentaries do not usually have a “Voice-of-God” commentary; they also have different approaches to conceptualize reality and deal with contingency in filmmaking. These observations are clearly true; though I think the division between the past and the present is not so binary.  When one examines the documentary productions in the Mao-era seriously, one finds some important continuities despite many ruptures.  I see documentary of the present as multiple responses to the end of the Mao-era.

dGF: Did your interest evolve from a dearth in research in Mao era documentary film?

Mao Zedong

YQ:  Yes. So far, Mao-era documentary films are almost entirely overlooked by both English-language and Chinese-language scholarship, so certainly I would like to fill this gap.  After all, documentary cinema was an integral part of people’s everyday experience during the Mao-era, and the total length of documentary produced during the period doubled that of fiction films.

But my interest in the Mao-era also comes from a personal interest in understanding my own love of cinema. The Mao era had infused in the population a love of cinema at a quite different register than that in the U.S.  When I grew up in China’s 1980s, cinema wasn’t really seen as entertainment.  Instead it was seen as a serious venue of artistic expression, and a way to think through large social problems.  It was as if suddenly the country emerged from the Mao-era traumatized and speechless, and had to resort to images to process half-thoughts and complex experiences. I am interested in understanding this particular type of cinephilia.

In recent years, the film industry in China has become more and more entertainment-oriented, but independent documentary continues the legacy of social cinema, staying connected to the society through a closer bond with historical reality.  At the moment, independent documentary in China has lots of energy, and filmmakers are courageous to try many topics, doing things trial and error.  However, theoretical and critical interventions are far from adequate.  My project hopes to offer such an intervention.

dGF:  Would you characterize your research a fusion between literary and historical criticism?

YQ:   Yes, it’s both a cultural history and a film studies dissertation.  History is a big part of the dissertation, and I use more theoretical writing by Chinese filmmakers and critics than critical theory from elsewhere.  I want to understand the intellectual and artistic resources available to filmmakers in particular historical moments, and these are very contextual.

dGF:  In April you organized a symposium titled “Just Images: Ethics and Chinese Documentary.”  How was the conference conceived?

YQ:  The original idea came from our curatorial work.  Since 2009, I have been curating with two other colleagues– Jie Li and J.P. Sniadecki—a Chinese independent documentary film series entitled “Emergent Visions” at the Fairbank Center at Harvard.  During the Q&A sessions after screenings, the idea of ethics would often arise.  For example, we screened Xu Tong’s Wheat Harvest.  This is a film about prostitution in China.  The discussion after the screening centered on the fact that the filmmaker didn’t obtain proper consent from the sex workers he had filmed.  Since sex work is illegal in China, the film might have brought risk of arrest and prosecution to the subjects in the film.

Disturbing the Peace (dir. Ai Weiwei, 2009)

Recently, we screened Ai Weiwei’s film Disturbing the Peace. Ai Weiwei’s filmmaking was irreverent and aggressive, especially when dealing with the police.  The question of “respect” came up during the discussion after the screening.  Some audience asked whether he was disrespectful to the police and forcing the camera into people’s faces; others commented on the various ways the film camera might have intervened into the interactions captured on the screen, whether filmmaking spurred violence and confrontation at times, while repressing them at other times.

The ethical practices of documentary filmmaking directly influence the kinds of films made, and the types of cinematic experience the audience is engaged in. The symposium aimed to discuss these issues.  In China, most independent documentary filmmakers are serious about their craft and purpose.  They believe in film as openers of public space of discourse, capable of negotiating interpersonal relationships in new, innovative ways.  They are using their cinema to examine the society and foster social transformations.  Because of their serious intent, we hope that bringing ethics into documentary discourse would also be important input to engage the filmmakers.

dGF: Who were the colleagues you organized this with?

YQ: I organized this with Jie Li and Professor Eugene Wang.  Jie Li is a college fellow at Harvard teaching East Asian cinema. Professor Eugene Wang works on both contemporary and traditional Chinese art.

dGF:  Who else participated?

YQ:  The community of scholars who work on Chinese documentaries is quite small.  We sent out invitations to the senior faculty first.  In the second round we invited more junior scholars. We also invited scholars who work on documentary photography, as it shares similar ethical issues with documentary cinema. Among our panelists are Professors Yingjin Zhang (UC San Diego), Carlos Rojas (Duke), Eileen Cheng-yin Chow (Duke), Claire Roberts (Australian National University), Qi Wang (Georgia Tech), Luke Robinson (Nottingham, UK), William Schaefer (U. Rochester) and others from Harvard (Winnie Wong, Eugene Wang, Jie Li and myself).

dGF:  There were three panels.  What interesting issues surfaced from the discussions on these panels?

YQ: We realized that ethics is a diffuse concept and there are many kinds of ethics to think about.  There is an ethics of filmmaking, how we attend to relations between the filmmakers and the subjects and the power dynamics between them.  There is also an ethics of representation, which registers symbolic violence imposed on the subjects. There is also an ethics of watching: how should we watch and discuss these films as audience?

Realizing the ethical questions involved in production and finding ways to solve these problems could help the filmmaker to innovate on film styles and forms. In exhibitions of documentary cinema in China, one still sees many purely observational films that seem to take camera as a transparent medium of representation.   I think the reason behind this (at times banal) style is the fact that ethical questions are not thought through.  Filmmakers are not allowing their films to register these ethical dilemmas of cinematic representation, even though actually allowing that would open up stylistic and formal innovation.

We also talked about issues of documentary film distribution.  Ethical issues are very contextual.  How you ethically represent an issue, social event, or a group of people sometimes is only apparent to an insider.  Only an insider can see the power dynamics between the subjects and the filmmakers.  When such a film travels to other parts of the world, where such power dynamics are not so easily detected by overseas audiences, the ethical question become more complicated.  We need to think about these cross-cultural exhibition issues.

dGF:  This is also related to the methods of documentary exhibition, especially in China.  These films are not getting commercial distribution.  They are being screened in museums and cinema clubs.

Ai Xiaoming

YQ: Yes. This is very problematic.  When documentary films are being showed in galleries that are only accessible by car, in a suburb of Beijing, it raises questions about the audience.  At the same time, now there are a lot of films that are distributed on line.  Some of the political documentaries made by Ai Xiaoming or Ai Weiwei are distributed online.  This is a more wide-reaching and democratic method of distribution.  We can see there is also an ethics of distribution and accessibility.

dGF:  How do those films evade the government censors?

YQ:  They don’t.  There is a continuing process of uploading and then deleting films.

dGF: Is there a sense, from filmmakers, of anticipation how a film will be perceived by audiences in China versus western audiences?  Is there a difference in topics or portrayal of subjects based on whether a film will receive international distribution?

YQ:  Most documentary filmmakers grew up in China.  They go overseas for film festivals, but it’s not very clear to me that they would be so culturally fluent as to correctly anticipate what a foreign audience would be interested in.  However, I do believe they are deeply influenced by film festivals.  Filmmakers who want to get into film festivals will find films are selected by film festivals as exemplary works.

Bumming in Beijing (dir. Wu Wenguang)

When independent Chinese documentary cinema developed in the early ‘90’s, there wasn’t a recognizable standard for what was considered a “good” documentary.  Film festivals became a crucial standard-setter.  The Hong Kong film festival screened Wu Wenguang’s first film Bumming in Beijing, and the Yamagata Documentary Film Festival in Japan bestowed awards upon it.  This gave lots of impetus to documentary making in the 1990s.  Suddenly this genre was considered equally promising as feature films, which were also getting prizes in international film festivals at the time.  Wu Wengguang also brought back from Yamagata works by Ogawa Shinsuke and Frederic Wiseman.  They subsequently became prototypes for documentary film in China.

dGF: There seems to be the idea that independent documentary in China is very counter-hegemonic.  While this may be true, to an extent, it roots are in the mainstream media in China, namely CCTV.

YQ:  I think that new documentary did start within the system in the 1980’s.  The models at that time, in the 1980’s, came from a number of sources.  A lot of them were from outside of China.  In 1980, there was collaboration between Japanese television crews and Chinese television crews.  They went on to make landscape documentaries about the Silk Road, the Yangtze River, and the Yellow River.  Through these collaborations, Chinese documentary TV producers were able to see how the Japanese producers worked.  Development of documentary film also grew from re-watching past films.  For example, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo was made in 1972, and was banned and criticized.  There was a mass campaign against this film in China.  Nevertheless, re-watching this film provided a lot of inspiration for documentary filmmakers in the 1980’s.

dGF:  Do you feel that Jia Zhangke has become that prototype for new narrative and documentary filmmakers?  It seems as if his influence is inescapable on the newer generations of documentary filmmakers and independent-narrative filmmakers.  We can almost see a formation of the Jia Zhangke category of film.

YQ:  That’s very interesting.  I would also say it’s a prototype for independent fiction cinema.  You see a lot of new filmmakers making fiction in a very similar way to Jia Zhangke.  But you know Jia Zhangke’s recent documentaries, for example I Wish I Knew and 24 City, are mostly interview-based, but we don’t see a rush to imitate that in the documentary community.

The Square (dir. Zhang Yuan and Duan Jinchuan)

In fact, I would say Jia Zhangke in his early years learned a lot from documentary filmmakers.  In Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu / Pickpocket, TV crews from the county’s television station were shown to make interviews with people on the streets. A similar setup was in a documentary film entitled The Square, made in 1993 by Zhang Yuan and Duan Jingchuan.  In The Square, the documentary lens showed a television crew from the CCTV orchestrating interviews at the Tian’anmen Square. The documentary camera of Zhang and Duan was filming the “documentary camera” of the CCTV, exposing the apparatus of official media in a comic way.  Jia Zhangke most likely had seen this film as the film community in the 1990s was quite tightly knit, and Zhang Yuan is a fellow Sixth Generationer.   In that case, Jia Zhangke was actually influenced by early to mid 1990’s documentary.

dGF:  Chinese filmmakers are usually quite deeply embedded in the communities they are documenting.  Do you think there are any ethical implications that arise from this relationship in terms of how subjects are portrayed and images are presented?

YQ: Embedment in a community and friendship with one’s film subjects are obviously very good things for documentary filmmaking.  The filmmaker Feng Yan, for example, has filmed a peasant woman from the Three Gorges region for many years, and from her film Bing’ai one can find, in the film frame, this deep inter-personal relationship. In the end, documentary film doesn’t document some pure reality; it documents how realities are understood and manifest in an inter-subjective space created by the filmmaker and the subjects.  Being embedded in the community in most cases allows a higher level of inter-subjectivity in the works.

However, it doesn’t mean that filmmakers would not abuse trusting subjects.  Subjects might be too embarrassed to say no to a friend’s camera in circumstances when they actually don’t like to be filmed.  Filmmakers might know the subjects so well that they can “stage” emotional scenes for them.  One of the papers presented by Qi Wang, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, concerns films where visible violence erupts in the frame.  In some films, the filmmaker artificially creates an environment where people will get upset and violence will break out.

dGF: What types of influence does the unique Chinese political and social environment have on the development of these films?

YQ:  Documentary cameras are deeply attracted to change.  In an environment that changes so swiftly and in such a massive scale daily, filmmakers are constantly stimulated to observe, grasp, and film.   Rapid social transformation explains the vitality of documentary cinema in the past two decades.  In terms of policing and censorship, it’s not easy to know to what extent the state has hindered filmmakers’ work.  Some filmmakers who made very controversial films are allowed to continue working, which means there is some room in the society for independent expression.  This room, of course, didn’t come as a gift from the state.  It has come through continuous efforts by filmmakers to push the boundaries.

Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul (dir. Hu Jie)

It’s very easy in China to turn conservative and say that films about certain subjects simply could not be made because they could potentially be banned. Self-censorship is the easier way, yet these filmmakers have been consistently choosing the hard way.  They really helped to push the envelope.  For example, Hu Jie made Searching for Lin Zhao’s  Soul in 2004.  It was about a political prisoner who was executed in 1968. At the time when Hu Jie made it, everyone was surprised that a film like this could be made.  Hu Jie had to leave his job while making it, because of the political sensitivity of the topic.  Yet in the end, it turned out ok.  The film was shown on some university campuses; it couldn’t be distributed in China but was downloadable online for a long time.  Lin Zhao became a household name after the film went viral online.  Filmmakers like Hu Jie are passionate about their subjects.  They take the risk to push the envelope just because they have to tell the story.  They then created room that later generations of filmmakers now enjoy.

The biggest hurdle, I think, is funding.  Many of these filmmakers are badly funded.  Some have to leave official jobs when their subjects become more politically sensitive, or when filming takes too much of their time. Wider distribution of Chinese documentary is necessary for the continued growth of the independent documentary film industry.  But wider distribution domestically is not yet possible due to the political circumstances.

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IFChina Studio founder and filmmaker Jian Yi, outside the studio on the campus of Jinggangshan University

Reprinted by permission from RealTime Arts Magazine.

Ji’an doesn’t look like the most auspicious place for a groundbreaking experiment in China’s budding civil society. The town doesn’t appear in any English language guidebooks, the local station platform is just a low-slung slab of concrete and, in early spring when i visited, a bone chilling mist hung over the town. Yet this minor chinese city is home to IFChina Original Studio, a bold attempt to generate community participation in the arts and oral history in the heart of one of China’s poorest regions.

hidden stories

“We wanted to start with oral history because this place is so special—the Chinese revolution under Mao Zedong started here,” explains Jian Yi, a gently spoken local filmmaker whose credits include the documentary Super, Girls (2007). Jian Yi founded IFChina Original Studio with his wife Eva in 2009 on the campus of Jinggangshan University. Their activities include theatre classes, video workshops and photography programs, all built on an oral history foundation.

In a nation where history is always highly contested and politicised terrain, IFChina’s attempts to record personalised stories from China’s recent past and incorporate these into theatre and film projects is not only brave—it’s virtually unprecedented. “We are really doing groundbreaking work,” Jian Yi acknowledges. “We are facing an audience with zero literacy about documentaries and narrative films…many people who come to our screenings say, ‘That was the first documentary I ever saw’.”

Despite being a minor city, Ji’an provides fertile ground for a documentary maker looking to generate community interest in oral history. The remnants of the Chinese Communist Party fled to this area after thousands of members were massacred by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in Shanghai in 1927, an incident that led to a fundamental shift in the previously urban-based party. As Mao Zedong rose to the fore with his vision of an agrarian-based revolution, the Communists regrouped and declared a Chinese Soviet Republic just south of Ji’an, a region they controlled until 1934, when encirclement forced them to embark on their “long march” to northwest China.

Since founding IFChina Original Studio, Jian Yi has been working with locals—mostly students from Jinggangshan University—to capture this history before it vanishes with only official accounts remaining that leave much unsaid. He cites a story from a 97-year-old local as an example of the tales they have uncovered: “This guy told a story of how his sister tried to get back the body of her husband, one of two men ‘wrongly executed’ by a faction of the Communists.” The murdered pair were local bandit leaders that Mao had persuaded to join his cause, but who were then killed in circumstances that remain unclear to this day. “The story was so human—you know, when we talk about Jinggangshan we think about this huge revolutionary era that’s so heroic. But this one little human story can reveal a side to the era that has been previously buried under slogans and a ‘grand’ historical narrative.”

IFChina Original Studio also works with locals to record more contemporary explorations of China’s rapidly shifting social reality. The 10,000 Village Writing Project will see students from rural areas at Jinggangshan University trained in recording oral history. “We’ll ask them first to write about their own family,” says Jian Yi. “We already have some young people writing about their experiences with the One Child policy. Most of the young female students from rural areas have younger brothers, so all of them have experience of the punishments of the policy. Then they will expand to their extended family, and the village as one community.”

One of their primary goals is to create a series of handbooks that will facilitate the creation of similar projects around the country, as well as hopefully leading Ji’an locals into more sophisticated forms of expression like documentary films. Jian Yi sees this nurturing of local culture as vital to China’s future, as the nation stands at a crossroads between its poverty stricken past and a materially wealthy but potentially culturally impoverished future under a system rife with restrictions.

“I’m convinced culture is a basic need,” Jian Yi asserts. “People are still trying to survive, but I don’t think we can survive as a proper society without culture. Many people around me are very cynical, while many people who do think independently tend to be very critical. I think it’s a step forward from not thinking at all, but then they don’t have the kind of positive energy which a society needs to cultivate and build something. I don’t think you can build something on negative energy, I don’t think you can build something on an emptiness.”

reconnecting

Participants in the studio

It was his desire to build and cultivate a positive ethos in one of China’s more disadvantaged regions that led Jian Yi to give up a comfortable academic position in Beijing and return to his hometown to establish IFChina Original Studio.

“I lived in Beijing for more than a decade—going to school, teaching and working,” Jian Yi recalls. “Being in Beijing you really begin to have illusions about the country and you begin to misjudge many things. When I came back [to Ji’an] every year to visit relatives, I felt like I was in a different world. So that was the first objective—to get reconnected to social realities. The second objective was to do something similar to what Wu Wenguang and I did with the Villagers’ Documentary Project.”

The Villagers’ Documentary Project was an earlier attempt to forge a creative space for China’s rural classes, who despite comprising the majority of the country’s population, rarely have the chance to represent their own lives in any medium, let alone a relatively expensive one like video. Jian Yi was able to garner funding from an EU project on village governance in 2005 and worked with well-known Chinese documentary maker Wu Wenguang (whose credits include China’s first independently produced documentary Bumming in Beijing back in 1990) to train farmers in documentary making. Jian Yi says his work on the Villagers’ Documentary Project gave him the experience and confidence he needed to strike out and establish IFChina Original Studio a few years later.

international exchange

In addition to fostering localised forms of creative expression, an important part of the studio’s vision is giving Ji’an locals exposure to visiting foreign residents and interns. These programs, in turn, provide visitors with a chance to experience China away from the booming urban centres like Beijing and Shanghai. “I think it would be very exciting for people to come here to do their work, because it’s a totally different environment to Beijing,” enthuses Jian Yi.

IFChina’s internship program provides young people with interests ranging from arts management to filmmaking an opportunity to spend anything from one month to a year working at the studio. Similarly, the residency program provides a chance for scholars, artists and filmmakers with an interest in participatory cultural work to spend one to two months living on campus at Jinggangshan University, working with IFChina.

As well as accommodation, the studio provides volunteer translators who will help residents visit the region’s more remote revolutionary sites, including some historic villages. “You know, the social realities are there—Mao Zedong started from the villages here, and today China’s rural areas are still where China’s future has to come from,” comments Jian Yi.

Although IFChina Original Studio is clearly underpinned by an ambitious vision, Jian Yi sums up their work in quite modest terms: “We try to do very little things in a little community.” Yet as an earlier generation of Chinese in the same area demonstrated 80 years ago, little things with deep roots can one day change a nation.

Arts workers and scholars interested in internships or residencies at the studio should contact Jian Yi via the IFChina website at: www.ifchinastudio.org.

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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.

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