Announcement of the China Independent Film Funding Recipients at the Fanhall website

By Isabella Tianzi Cai

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Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema

I was able to attend two events last month that showcased the strength, diversity, and vitality of new independent documentaries from China. The first, at BAFICI, the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema, was a section on recent Chinese independent docs that I curated for the festival. Intended as an abbreviated look back at the past 2 years or so of Chinese indies, I selected eight films (but could easily have chosen twenty) that represented different directions in what I called “radical” documentary filmmaking (using “radical” as broadly defined, in form or in content) in China today:

Ximaojia Universe, d. Mao Chenyu, 2009

Disorder, d. Huang Weikai, 2009

Ghost Town, d. Zhao Dayong, 2008

Survival Song, d Yu Guangyi, 2008

Wheat Harvest, 2008, d. Xu Tong

Disturbing the Peace, d. Ai Weiwei, 2009

Using, d. Zhou Hao, 2008

Bing Ai, d. Feng Yan, 2007

The Argentinian press and BAFICI audences keyed onto the more political aspects of the films: an exemplary piece is by the Argentine super-critic Quintin in Perfil magazine here in Spanish. I tried at the same time to highlight innovations in form and style as well as an incipient trend away from the political and towards the personal. See below for a few new signs of this quick flourishing (at China-speed, where things happen in an unimaginably compressed timeframe) of a contemporary Chinese cinema of the personal.

From Buenos Aires to Songzhuang village, just outside of Beijing

Poster for China Independent Documentary Film Festival

Songzhuang’s latest film festival, the 2010 edition of their annual Chinese Independent Documentary Film Festival, made my BAFICI film list look like old, stale news. Officially called, in English, the 7th Documentary Film Festival China (or Diqi jie Zhongguo jilupian jiaoliuzhou), Songzhuang this year presented a selection of completely new documentaries, mostly premieres, filmed in many cases by first-time directors whose work I was encountering for the first time. Programmers Zhu Rikun, Wang Hongwei, and Ying Liang put together a consistently interesting selection: ten feature-length documentaries in competition, plus another ten out of competition. Additional sidebars focussed on Wu Wenguang’s recent work, on Swiss documentaries, on a retrospective of Korean director Kim Dong-won, and on a selection of independent Singapore documentaries.

Every year the Songzhuang indie film scene shows encouraging signs of incremental progress, as an institution and as a community. This year there were exciting infrastructure developments: a second meeting room, a lushly appointed cafe and meeting place (spartan in its previous incarnation) with a useful variety of drinks (most essential for pre- and post-film discussions and gatherings, where filmmakers, curators, journalists, and audiences could spend hours talking over the films we’ve just seen); and a range of DVDs of indie Chinese docs for sale. On the festival side, projection quality in Fanhall Films‘ well-appointed basement theatre continued to be exemplary; though Songzhuang town’s municipal Art Centre’s projection facilities continue to be sub-par. It’s encouraging to hear, though, that Zhu Rikun’s Fanhall Films complex will be expanding even further, and that a second film theatre is in the works. They also plan to build, as part of the complex, a hotel for guests and for students and teachers of the school for young filmmakers that Fanhall has established over the past year. That should be the subject of another posting.

Every year at Songzhuang, the international contingent of visitors increases in size and significance. In addition to the above-mentioned sidebars, each of which had several overseas guests, there were, by my count, an unprecedented three representatives from international distribution companies at the Songzhuang screenings this year. Rather amazing, thought it shows something about the “buzz” that Chinese independent films seem to acquired outside of the country.

The Village Elementary (dir. Huang Mei)

Speaking of the films themselves, amidst a generally high level of accomplishment across the board for these young directors’ first or second films, a number stood out for me, all, it turns out, by woman directors. The eventual first prize winner, The Spiral Staircase of Harbin (Haerbin xuanzhuan louti), is by veteran director Ji Dan. She uses interviews to paint an intense, soul-bearing investigation of two friends from her youth, one poor and ill, the other middle class but stressed, set against Harbin’s symbol-laden cityscape. New director Huang Mei has shot a deceptively simple film about rural education and poverty called The Village Elementary (Changchuan cun xiao). Her honesty, her respect for her subjects, including a charismatically intellectual, politically aware, but sadly frustrated Sichuanese elementary teacher, gives the film a dirt-poor lyricism that tightly binds the minute details of individual lives to larger issues of political powerlessness and economic dependence. Liu Heng’s Back to Daxian (Huidao Daxian) is also set in a school in Sichuan. This rambunctious, rough-hewn but sometimes shockingly vivid glimpse of urbanized seventh graders battling with their teachers, parents, and each other is compulsively watchable. Most ambitious, and most strange in its epic scope and eerie tone, is Yang Yishu’s second film On The Road (Lushang).  She planned to shoot a road documentary, riding with a couple of truckers through southern China, when what turned out to be China’s worst winter storm in a century struck, transforming their road-bound world into a nightmare of snow, ice, and immobility.

If there had been an audience award, it would surely have gone to A Song of Love, Maybe (Lianqu) by the (male) director Zhang Zanbo. Snazzy and snappy, surprisingly slick, like reality TV with Chinese indie characteristics, Zhang shot the ultra-personal moments of a young KTV hostess and her louse of a boyfriend, whose soap-operatic duplicity is apparent to everyone but her. Emotional breakdowns, shocking revelations, captured by Zhang’s high-def fly-on-the-wall camera.

A couple of issues cropped up again and again during our (now beer- and wine-enabled) post film sessions, one technical, the other ethical. Many of the documentaries this time ran three hours or longer. Wang Bing has a lot to answer for. There are of course subjects that demand amplitude and epic treatment, but it seems not unlikely that a significant number of the over-extended films now being produced would benefit from some rigorous, third-party editing. Freedom can mean freedom from intrusive editing ; independence can mean independent from the filtering, controlling hand of a director; the imperative to catalogue and preserve a fast-disappearing reality can mean that one’s all footage has archival significance: but not necessarily, and not all the time.

I’ll just leave a marker here for the other hotly debated issue, to be discussed another time. How much explicit consent should an independent documentary filmmaker give her or his subject before, during, and after the filming? How much power can the subjects of the film claim? What are the implications of an unbalanced relationship of power between a camera-wielding filmmaker, and the subjects captured and exposed by that camera? How implicated is the audience in a kind of exploitation, an active consensual voyeurism, when films with vague or aggressive concepts of these boundaries are projected? Some of the more intimately personal films at Songzhuang raised these questions, and they need urgently to be debated and re-argued.

Tape (dir. Li Ning)

I have to mention two of the weirdest films at Songzhuang this year, both approaching something like experimental / fictional / performance / documentaries, both by male directors, each of which left me alternately stupefied and somehow curious for yet more. Dancer Li Ning’s Tape (Jiaodai), an epic three hour film on himself, his performance art, and his doomed troupe of guerilla urban dancers, was wildly disorganized but intermittently compelling. And new director Xue Jianqiang’s bravura night poem Martian Syndrome (Huoxing yao zonghezheng) is as hallucinatory in its image aesthetic as it is infuriating in its documentary ethics.

All of which confirms that the future of Chinese indie documentaries still looks bright, diverse, healthily contested, and always full of surprises.

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The Spiral Staircase of Harbin (dir. Ji Dan) [Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

The Festival announced its awards for the following films (with citations by the jury in quotes):

Independent Spirit Award
Spiral Staircase of Harbin (dir. Ji Dan)
 
A Harbin apartment complex is home to two broken households and fragile relationships between parents and teenage children in this pensive study of cross-generational conflict.

“Through her unadorned, everyday visual angle, the director shows us ordinary real life in China.  In its conciseness and depth, the film truly has the energy of genuine tragedy.”

Jury Prize
Fortune Teller (dir. Xu Tong)
 
“The story of a crippled fortune teller and his deaf-mute wife highlights the wit, compassion and compassion of (fortune teller) Li Baicheng.  Xu Tong’s lively editing pace and intimate lens show how the pressure of progress pushes modern city folks to seek help from a traditional fortune teller.”

Excellent Documentary Award
Martian Syndrome (dir. Xue Jianqiang)
 
A highly experimental first person account of the director’s relationship with his friend, who thinks he is a Martian.

“Happening through chance encounters, and resulting in images that are collage-like in content and form, the film takes us completely by surprise.”

Special Mentions
 
A Song of Love, Maybe (dir. Zhang Zanbo)
 
“Attempted from a young woman’s point of view, the film reveals her inner struggle between love and self-respect. The director also simultaneously uses his film to show how her life as a Karaoke waitress has transformed her entire way of communicating about feelings.” 
 
Mouthpiece (dir. Guo Xizhi)

“Independent in its visual angle, the film provides a look at the inner workings of the government propaganda machine, revealing the intimate intertwining of the production of news, the director’s life, and the city of Shenzhen itself.”

More information about the festival can be found at Fanhall Films.

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The Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Home of the Chinese Independent Film Archive (Photo courtesy of Iberia Center of Contemporary Art)

By Shelly Kraicer

Whenever I am interviewed about Chinese independent cinema, the question that comes up more often than anything else is “Can these kind of films be shown in China?”

The situation is changing, rapidly, and in substantial ways. The answer used to be “Yes, sort of”.  Now, it’s “Yes, most definitely”.

Independent films, i.e. films made outside the government censorship system, can’t be shown in regular commercial movie theatres.  When I arrived in Beijing back in 2003, one had to do a bit of investigative work to find screenings; at art galleries, a few bars and cafes, and occasionally on university campuses: all low- to zero-profile events.  Now, though, there is, if not exactly a profusion, then something like a blossoming of screening opportunities for “unauthorized” Chinese indie films.

One such event, which I attended in early April, provides a handy opportunity to sketch out a provisional, though hopefully not too superficial overview of the Chinese independent film scene.

The Chinese Independent Film Archive (CIFA) organized their first annual film festival from 29 March to 19 April this year.  Called “What Has Been Happening Here”, the festival took place in the CIFA’s headquarters at the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, in Beijing’s 798 Art District.

The comprehensive exhibition was well organized and impressively curated.  There were several sections: one featured screenings of new Chinese independent DV films; one provided a smartly chosen and extremely useful overview of the history of Chinese DV films from its origins in the 1990s to now; one provided a retrospective of films made by Jia Zhangke’s company XStream Films, and the directors associated with it (Jia himself, his regular d.p. Yu Lik-wai, Emily Tang, and Han Jie); and a final section offered selections from the last ten years of experimental/avant garde DV work.  Accompanying these screenings, which ran morning to evenings daily for 21 days, was an exhibit in the Iberia Center capacious gallery space that surveyed the indie film scene in China today.  It highlighted the six key organizations involved in producing, distributing, and exhibiting the films, with supporting documentation, videos, artifacts, and a rich selection of materials.  The institutions featured were:

• Chinese Independent Film Festival (CIFF)
• Fanhall Films
• Li Xianting’s Film Fund
• Beijing Indie Workshop
• Caochangdi Workstation
• Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival (Yunfest)

First, a word about CIFA itself.  It is a non-profit academic institution, founded in 2008, devoted to “sorting, collecting, and promoting” contemporary Chinese independent films.  The CIFA underlines that it is a non-governmental film archive, in implicit distinction to the PRC’s China Film Archive, the very official, bureaucratic national institution devoted to safeguarding official, approved Chinese cinema.  The CIFA’s director, Zhang Yaxuan, is an expert on Chinese independent documentaries and a film maker and producer herself.  The facilities of CIFA within the Iberia Art Centre at 798 include a spanking new screening room of 79 comfortable seats.  The excellent projection and sound equipment — the finest yet that I’ve encountered in a Chinese non-commercial venue — suggests that the CIFA is well enough funded not to skimp on necessities.  The screenings themselves were well-run (though there was occasional trouble getting the projection ratios right, necessitating your correspondent dashing to the projection booth to discuss the accuracy of the watermelon-shaped heads on screen).

The Chinese Independent Film Festival was founded in 2003.  It is located in elegantly livable, gracious Nanjing, one of China’s most important intellectual centres, and features an annual festival of all genres of Chinese independent cinema (features, documentaries, shorts).  CIFF has since 2007 instituted a juried competition section.  Run in conjunction with the Nanjing RCM Art Museum, the CIFF uses a variety of venues around Nanjing to show an excellent selection of what their programmers (including Zhang Xianmin and Cao Kai) consider to be the year’s best Chinese indie films, based on their mission to support “independent spirit, openness, inventive in form, forward thinking” cinema.  I’ve attended the 2007 edition, which offered a relatively low-key but well-attended series of concurrent screenings over about a week (in 2008 the festival took place in late September).  The discussions after the films, and among the filmmakers, though, were anything but low key: the festival cultivates a real sense of intellectual energy and ferment.

Fanhall Films, run by Zhu Rikun, is a multi-faceted indie film support organization based in Songzhuang Arts District, a distant eastern suburb of Beijing.  Fanhall started as a website and online discussion forum and has broadened into film production and distribution.  They have produced a series of indie films, released (authorized) DVDs in China of unauthorized films (a neat trick, and a good subject for a later post), and sponsor the China Documentary Film Festival and the Beijing Independent Film Festival (each annually, in Songzhuang).  They also constructed, last year, a comfortable medium-sized screening room, above which is a spacious cafe and small exhibition space.  The trip out to Songzhuang is long (a grueling 2 hours plus by bus from the centre of Beijing), but Zhu Rikun and his staff take advantage of the community feel provided by the artists village at Songzhuang, and invite directors to spend the week during their festivals.  Community-building is a vital part of their agenda.  For more detail on the 2008 version, see my first blog entry.

Also based at Songzhuang, and closely supporting Fanhall’s film exhibition events, is the Li Xianting Film Fund.  The fund was started in 2006 by the famous art critic Li Xianting, who raises funds from artists, now outrageously prosperous in the international art market, whom he supported in the 1980s and 90s.  The fund is building an archive of independent films to support the work of researchers and filmmakers, publishes a journal, and provides grants for the development, production, and post-production of new film projects.  It also co-presents the Beijing Independent Film Festival and the China Documentary Film Festival with Fanhall Films.

Beijing Indie Workshop was founded by Beijing Film Academy professor Zhang Xianmin in 2005.  A non-profit organization supporting indie filmmakers, Indie Workshop provides equipment and post-production facilities for impecunious filmmakers, produces films, and organizes a continuing series of informal screenings and rigorous discussions of recent works (I’ve been fortunate to attend a few, which combine an intellectual salon flavour with organized film appreciation — participants are encouraged to fill out scorecards and give ratings for each film screened).  It also works to connect new filmmakers and films with foreign festivals, curators, and researchers.

Caochangdi Workstation was founded in 2005 by documentary filmmaker and theoretician Wu Wenguang.  It is made up of his Documentary Studio, the Living Dance Studio, and the Beijing Storm Company.  It provides a space for video and performance art, supports the work of filmmakers, and hosts a series of film, video, and performance exhibitions and festivals at its space in Caochangdi, a suburb of Beijing close to the 798 Arts District.  This year, CCD are hosting a May Festival of performance (works from their 2009 Young Choreographers’ Project) and film (a Documentary Forum).  CCD’s workshops include support for an ongoing series of films called the Villager Documentary Project (documentaries made by people living in Chinese villages, provided with technical and organizational support by CCD Workstation).

The Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival was launched in 2003, and is bi-annual.  It’s a documentary film festival based in Kunming, Yunnan, featuring screenings of Chinese and foreign documentaries, a documentary competition, and seminars bringing together Chinese and foreign documentary filmmakers.  Yunfest was founded with a strong anthropological-documentary film bent, and still has a section devoted to these films.

I’m tempted to try to compare the programming philosophies of the various festivals, but hesitate to generalize without enough data.  So I only offer this as a very tentative, provisional sketch, and really invite comment or correction (see the comment link below).  BIFF/CDFF tend, I’d say, to emphasize the political role of cinema, film as social critique and as agent for social/political change.  They are willing to push the edge, sometimes quite a bit, on political content, though are savvy about keeping a low enough profile to get away with some programming risks.  CIFF in Nanjing, while supporting these films too, seems to put equal or greater emphasis on film as art, and championing films that are formally innovative and  aesthetically risky.  CIFA, at least in its first incarnation, builds a historical context, and has an interest in defining something like a canon of Chinese independent cinema.  But I’m really reluctant to over-generalize, and genuinely welcome suggestions on how to clarify the above suggestions.

Chinese film events are obsessively self-documenting: there’s always at least one person from the organization filming everything that goes on.  So that’s good news if you are doing research in the field; there should be resources available if you want to follow Q&As, panel discussions, and directors’ comments from any of the events.  It’s not quite like being there, though.  One does have to attend these festivals to really get a sense of the ferment, energy, seriousness (lots of seriousness) and dedication that the small communities of Chinese filmmakers and their supporters bring to their activities.  Which, in this time of slumps (both economic and creative, cinematically speaking), is a terrifically encouraging thing.

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