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.

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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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By Isabella Tianzi Cai

Advisors Cara Mertes and Lixin Fan listen to a filmmaker in a small group at CNEX/DFP workshops. (Photo: Meredith Lavitt)

From April 13 to 16, 2011, Sundance Institute held its Film Forward Program in China to showcase ten excellent independent films as part of its international outreach project to promote intercultural exchange. Film Forward was initiated by the Sundance Institute and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and organized in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The program coincided with the Sundance Institute – CNEX Documentary Film Workshop, in which eleven Chinese documentary project teams had the privilege to interact directly with the foreign talents and industry experts brought on by the collaboration.

CNEX is currently one of the world’s most active players in terms of bringing attention and assistance to Chinese documentary filmmaking. It is a non-governmental organization based in Beijing with staff members working in Taiwan and North America. Founded in 2006, it has grown consistently over the years and continued to help produce and promote Chinese documentary cinema internationally.

The responses to both the Film Forward Program and the workshop were incredibly enthused. Audiences and participants eagerly sought answers to their own questions about the films screened as well as about general filmmaking practices.

Kate Dean, the producer of Winter’s Bone, wrote that she was pleasantly surprised by the first question she got after her film’s screening in Xi’an. Instead of the usual trite questions we hear at every film festival, an audience member asked her if the search for a father figure in the film could be interpreted as the search for spirituality, because in the English language, “Father” is synonymous with God. Coming from a Chinese-speaking person, this question impressed Kate.

Stanley Nelson, the director of Freedom Riders, was equally impressed by the quality of audience response when he showed his film to students at Tsinghua University and the Beijing Film Academy. He was worried at first that they would have a hard time understanding the context of his story, but the first question he received turned out to be identical to the one he received in the United States. Additionally, in exchange for trying to explain racial segregation in US history, he got to hear Chinese people’s will to strive for freedom. It made the Q&A meaningful to him at many levels.

Fan Lixin’s Last Train Home, a Canadian-produced television documentary about China’s migrant workers, had its premiere in China during the program. According to Meredith Lavitt in her blog article, the film aroused hot debates each time it was played. From his interactions with audiences in Beijing, Xi’an, and his hometown Wuhan, Fan wrote that he repeatedly sensed “confused patriotism.” He sincerely hoped that his film could expose Chinese people to a new way of loving their country. Instead of saving face by covering its problems up, more good can be done by openly discussing these problems.

As for the advisers working side-by-side with the invited Chinese documentary filmmakers, the three-day workshop was physically exhausting; however, it paid off with a string of accomplishments. As Cara Mertes observed:

By the closing reception, it was clear that a new community of filmmakers had connected across China, and a common goal of telling authentic stories had been reached. All of the filmmakers made tangible strides conceptually, from developing plans for refining their films’ structure to creating materials for gaining funding to decisions to work with editing and producing advisors.

Indeed, by the end of the programs, not only the filmmakers involved but also the organizers realized that they were in the right direction of promoting cross-cultural dialogue. As the world becomes more connected through such programs, helping people tell and show their own stories through films is an ever more worthy cause.

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dGenerate Films President and Founder Karin Chien

Dan Edwards of The Beijinger profiles dGenerate Films’ President Karin Chien. The purpose of the company, as Edwards quotes Karin, was “to bring Chinese perspectives on the People’s Republic to US audiences.” There is a need for this due to language and cultural barriers between China and America. Most available films and television programs about China in the US and elsewhere tend to represent “an outsider’s view of China tailored to a western audience.” They are very different from the perspectives offered by native Chinese filmmakers.

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Opening Ceremony of the 7th China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing (photo courtesy of CIFF)

By Sara Beretta

The 7th China Independent Film Festival (CIFF), which ran from October 21-25, was a five-day affair packed with screenings and forums. Among the changes in this year’s event were a new curatorial team (Dong Bingfeng, Du Qingchun, Wei Xidi) and a new location, Nanjing University. Under the guidance of Zhang Xianmin (Beijing Film Academy Professor, curator, critic, filmmaker, actor, producer and dGenerate consultant), the curators worked with both the Committee (Cao Kai, Chen Yun, Li Li, Zhang Xiamin, Zhou Kai) and the Selection Team (Cai Meng, Liu Jiayin, Wang Liren, Wei Xidi, Wang Xiaolu) put together a stellar program of events and screenings.

The Festival offered different sections, such as “Feature Film Competition”, “Top Ten Documentaries of the Year”, “New Swiss Films”, “Wide Land and Deep Sky” and “Contemporary Artists New Images Works Exhibition”, as well as indie pioneer Zhang Yuan’s solo exhibition at RCM Museum. A huge audience (mainly students, visitors and professional) and outstanding guests took part to forums and screenings, including dGenerate’s founder and President Karin Chien, and critic, curator and dGenerate’s editorial contributor Shelly Kraicer.

The Jury (composed by experts Han Dong, Cui Zien, Hu Fang, Lu Yue and Ning Dai) assigned the First Prize to Li Ruijun with The Old Donkey, chose Liu Jian’s animation film Piercing for Debut Prize and Rivers and My Father by Li Luo for the Jury’s Prize. All the three works contend with self-reflection and memory, though in different ways and from distinctive perspectives.

Performance by Li Ning's J-Town dance troupe at the CIFF Opening Ceremony (photo courtesy of CIFF)

In lieu of a documentary prize, the festival offers a “Top Ten Documentaries” showcasing the year’s best work in the genre.  Some possessed an ethnographic imprint, like Chen Xinzhong’s Red White, that reports the Sichuan post-earthquake with a very intimate glance; Mao Chenyu’s Triumph of the Will portrays the Tujia minority’s Nuo Opera in Guizhou Province; Qiu Jiongjiong’s movingly original Madame presents Madame Bi Langda telling her life story. The three hour experimental work Tape by Li Ning is also remarkable; what’s more, the author and his crew opened the festival with a memorable live performance. Different in approach and somehow controversial are the works by the young and fresh Xue Jianqiang, with his provocative Martian Syndrome and I Beat the Tiger When I Was Young, and Cop Shop by Zhou Hao (whose film Using is distributed by dGenerate).

Among the many noteworthy narrative features, one standout was the humorous, reality-based Single Man by Hao Jie, wherein the director returned to his country roots to involve peasants in a tricky and reflexive relationship story investigating the course of history and villagers’ life. Single Man and Yuan Fei’s Cleaning both received special mention from the Jury. Tracing the boundaries of the real, unreal and super-real are Li Hongqi’s Winter Vacation and The High Life by Zhao Dayong (in dG’s catalogue with Street Life and Ghost Town).

Along with the screenings, a contemporary audiovisual art exhibition was inaugurated at Shandong Contemporary Art Center, highlighting the relevant emerging relationship between Art and Film in Chinese Contemporary, investigated, studied and discussed here by Samantha Culp.

From this year’s CIFF, one can already sense that Chinese independent film is running through a very particular period fueled by the collective urge of (mostly young) people compelled to express themselves, to record their memories, and to tell a reality that’s becoming increasingly subjective. Armed with increasingly accessible filmmaking equipment, their efforts range from the ethnographically objective to the intensely self-reflexive. The results are moving, exciting and promising.

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Zhang Xianmin, manager of the China Independent Film Fund

At the Pusan International Film Festival, Variety reports that a new fund has been set up to help the production of independent films in China.

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dGenerate Films got a mention in Mitch Moxley’s article, “Now Showing – Independent Films,” at Inter Press Service (IPS) News Agency’s website on August 27, 2010. The article is a report on China’s indie scene; it stresses the symbiotic relationship between China’s big-budget productions and its independent productions. According to Moxley’s interviewed subjects, which include Professor Cui Weiping from Beijing Film Academy and Programming and Marketing Manager Wu Jing from Broadway Cinematheque, when commercial cinema grows and matures, indie cinema ought to thrive too. Moxley briefs the production code that Chinese independent filmmakers face, and he names the existing distribution and exhibition channels for their films, including dGenerate.

Read the full article.

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Thomas Mao (dir. Zhu Wen)

By Shelly Kraicer

During a recent interview with an independent Chinese journalist, I was somewhat taken aback, but also quite amused by her rather pointed question to me: “In an online discussion of an article you wrote recently, some [anonymous] commenter was skeptical that Westerners could be so interested in debating Chinese movies and ideology, when in fact it has nothing to do with them. What do you think?”

What could I think? I remember reading the original comment the journalist was referring to, and noting at the time that the implied (and oft-heard) background to this attitude was something along the lines of “outsiders [like you] are fundamentally unequipped to comment on (write about / research about / review) our Chinese films (painting / dramas / novels), so just what do you think you are doing, anyway?

At the risk of answering one cultural judgment with another, I find this display of an aggressively protective attitude to Chinese culture to be distinctly Beijing-ese. Hong Kong, Taipei and Shanghai tend to be much more relaxed about foreigners in their midst, given their cosmopolitan histories. Their urban intellectual cultures more readily admit “other” voices — foreign voices, alternative points of view — with fewer hangups than Beijing’s thriving and otherwise open intellectual culture. Beijing has long been the capital of mainland Chinese independent film and avant-garde culture. No less than half of the dGenerate Films catalog are by Beijing-based filmmakers: Jia Zhangke, Liu Jiayin, and Cui Zi’en, to name a few. And yet, despite its openness to progressive artisitic activity, Beijing has an intensely policed view of the cultural “other” and the potential role of these “others” in its cultural discourse.

(Article continues after the break.)

There may be several reasons for this dichotomy. Beijing has been a more homogeneous Chinese city until quite recently (dating to probably the early part of this century, with the internationalization of Beijing’s urban surface, at least, in the lead up to the 2008 Olympics). And Beijing remains (in a certain, conflicted, post-Cultural Revolution way), the incubator, curator, and protector of a certain idea of Chinese culture. This protective attitude leads Beijing’s cultural workers to patrol (though, again, for completely understandable reasons having to do with resistance to various colonialisms and post-colonial hegemonisms) the boundaries of “us” (Chinese) and “them” (foreigners). This attitude often strives to keep “our” (i.e. Chinese-made) cultural works in a safe zone, circumscribed and patrolled by rather regressive definitions of “the Other”. I’m generalizing, obviously, but I hope not uselessly.

There are clear exceptions: many Chinese intellectuals I know joyfully and productively bring Western cultural theoretical concepts into their work, and play, creatively, in the spaces between Western post-theories and the various streams of Chinese historical cultural heritages. Western voices themselves, though, talking about Chinese art and artists, are entertained somewhat problematically. People in Beijing are often curious about what I’m working on (film research, for example), and are curious to hear my opinions, though they often far too quickly take these as somehow representative of a particular template of what “a Westerner thinks about our Chinese movies” (which is rather often far from the case, especially with my willfully idiosyncratic readings of what I’m watching here). But there comes a point in most conversations I have with Chinese colleagues where things sadly grind to a halt, to a refrain something like “there are just certain things you won’t be able to understand, since you’re not Chinese”. You can almost hear the intended effect: the portcullis clangs down, the drawbridge ratchets up, and the castle is secure with you safely outside. What can a “non-Chinese person” say to that? Any attempt to argue the point circles back to demonstrate that you just “can’t know”. It’s a completely self-sealing argument.

Now, this objection is also true, to a point. I’m still learning Chinese, and it’s getting better, but still not good enough. I’m learning more Chinese history, but there is an awful lot I still have to learn. I’ve been living here for seven years trying to immerse myself in various contemporary cultural scenes, but there’s a lot I’m still missing. Beijing is just so huge, and its culture workers are in the midst of an explosion of creativity in so many fields. Yet, these limitations don’t guarantee that one is at some basic level sealed out of the heart of things. Foreigners like me who are in a certain sense committed to learning about China can constantly approach, asymptotically, if you will, an insider’s point of view. We won’t get there (the asymptotic line never actually reaches the axis it’s creeping towards), but we can get closer and closer. And certainly close enough to say interesting things about the art we’re seeing, and the artists we’re meeting.

I hope I’m far from functioning as one of those old-fashioned restrictive “portals” that Western “China hands” used to assume the role of. Those arbiters of what examples of essential “Chineseness” can pass through their filtering critical gaze to be consumed by the outside, non-Chinese world. That period of the “mysterious Orient” is fortunately long gone, although its traces are stubbornly hard to eradicate, both in the West (just look at the kinds of Chinese films that are still attracting distributors’ hard cash in North America and Europe) and in China itself, where distrust of the limits of “China experts” is something I bump into all the time. So much so that I quickly cringe when someone calls me a “Chinese expert” here, given all the baggage, described above, that necessarily comes with that label.

Two films I’ve seen happen to reflect in interesting ways on the issues behind this othering of Outsiders. I hope to be able to discuss them here in more detail later, but for now, I’d at least like to point towards them in this context:

Zhu Wen’s delightfully paradoxical Thomas Mao (Xiao dongxi) is a fictional tale about a Chinese farmer and a German artist; then it flips to a semi-documentary about a Chinese painter and a European curator. Zhu stages various confrontations between the Foreigner and the Chinese in a series of modes (comedy, science fiction, wuxia, documentary) and flips the stakes again and again, until the outside/inside distinction starts to blur and melt away. Also in semi-experimental mode, Yang Rui’s mysteriously beautiful abstract-fictional-poetic-essay Crossing the Mountain (Fan shan) aims its substantial visual gifts and structural puzzles directly at cultural boundaries: the mysterious bombs spiking the plot threaten to blow up the borders that delineate the film’s characters, and a hazy erotic languor somehow insinuates connections that go through or around the violence and horror marking out Difference.

I’d be fortunate indeed if I could cultivate that sort of languor, eroticized or not. But I’m happy to root out paradoxes, and confront limits wherever I can find them. I’ll certainly keep trying to butt my head up against the Difference Police, both here and at home, and demonstrate that the most interesting boundaries are the ones one can work to sneak around, undermine, or blow up.

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Peng Tao at the Sanlitun Apple Store, Beijing

Peng Tao is the award-winning director of Little Moth (2007) and a graduate of the Art Department of Beijing Film Academy, where he received the Outstanding Short Film Award and first prize at the 1st JINZI Awards. Peng Tao’s second feature, Floating in Memory (2009), is supported by the prestigious Sundance Institute Feature Film Program and the Hubert Bals Fund, and screened in the VPRO Tiger Awards Competition at the 2009 International Film Festival Rotterdam.

The video of Peng’s interview is in three parts, with an English transcript following each video. Video of Part One is below. Click through to view both videos and the full transcript. Interview conducted by Jane Zheng. Videography by Michael Cheng. English transcription and subtitles by Yuqian Yan and Isabella Tianzi Cai.

Note: English subtitles for each video can be accessed by clicking on the CC button in the pop-up menu on the bottom right corner of the player.

VIDEO PART ONE

JZ: I know you graduated from the Beijing Film Academy. The literature department, right?

PT: Yes.

JZ: Most students from the literature department become scriptwriter. How did you become a director from a scriptwriter? It’s quite a big change. Can you tell us about this process?

PT: I think everyone can become a director because being a director is to express your thoughts and understanding of life. Beijing Film Academy provided me opportunities to study all kinds of basic professional knowledge. You don’t have to stick to your major. We all have different ideas about the future. After I finished my script, I felt that only I could best present the thoughts I wanted to express. So I decided to direct it myself. Other people might not like my script.

JZ: Did you show it to other people or is it just your assumption?

PT: Not this one, but it did happen before. They thought it was not good enough.

JZ: Scriptwriter and director are two different roles. You’ve done both. So what do you think the biggest difference is between these two roles?

PT: I think script is the blueprint of a film.  It’s you need a plan to build a house. Everything is based on this plan.  The role of a scriptwriter is to draw the blueprint, whereas the director’s responsibility is to build the actual house, to realize it with images.

JZ: To organize the workers to build the house.

PT: Right. The president of Beijing Film Academy once said that a director is like a supervisor. He/she has other people do technical work for him/her. A director just needs to supervise their work and make final check.

JZ: Another opinion is that a director is not good at everything; he/she only knows a little bit of everything. His/her most important role is to organize people with expertise to finish the film. What do you think about this?

PT: I kind of agree.  Nowadays, people with all sorts of occupations make films, such as poets, writers, and dancers, not just students graduated from Film Academy.

JZ: I think many in our audience today want to be a director in spite of their varied background.

PT: I believe everyone can be a director because they all have their own understanding and feeling of life.

JZ: Thank you for encouraging us. We just saw the 2-minute trailer. Perhaps many people still don’t know what the film is about. I know that your second film is called Floating in Memory. Can you tell us more about your two films and your recent project?

PT: Both of my two films, Little Moth and Floating in Memory, reflect the current situation in Chinese society and the life condition of ordinary people and what they are thinking. They are not about urban subjects, but semi-urban, semi-rural subjects.

JZ:  Where was it filmed?

PT: In Yuan’an County in Hubei province.

JZ: Why did you choose that place?

PT: Because it suits the characters in my script.  It’s a small remote county that matches the script.  So I picked that place.

JZ: My question is why you didn’t choose a city that is closer to our life? What made you decide to present the life of people who are so far away from us?

PT: I was born in city and grew up in city. I’ve never lived in the countryside.  Many people asked me the same question why I didn’t depict city life but chose countryside or small counties. China is such a huge country. I don’t think big cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are representative of the entire country.  Second and third-tier cities, small counties and countryside are more representative of China. Moreover, among the 1.4 billion Chinese populations, the majority are still peasants. More than 1 billion are peasants, only 20 or 30 million people live in cities. But there are only very few contemporary Chinese films reflect the life of peasants. I think that these are the best place to show the reality and social change of contemporary China.

JZ: As you told me before, the subject matter of your two films is a bit dark. Have you ever received any criticism? For quite a long time, people have been criticizing Chinese directors for using dark or marginalized side of China to appeal to oversea film festivals.  What made you choose this subject matter for your film? I know your film has won many awards abroad. Please tell us what you think.

PT: I think China is experiencing dramatic changes right now. This change is different from that in the 80s or 90s since its economical development and international status are incomparable to then. You can feel a difference every day. In the past, you could easily win awards as long as you made a different voice from the government. Now it’s totally different. You can’t get attention simply by making a different voice or throwing out a marginalized subject. Now there are lots of independent Chinese films, not everyone can get recognition. I think the most important thing is that your film should reflect true human emotions, life condition and also hope. As long as a film is innovative and has its unique style, subject and perspective, it can be accepted both in and outside China.

JZ: A film that reveals true feelings is a good film.

PT: Right. The fundamental concern is people.

JZ: Let’s talk about your new film.

PT: I’m now preparing for my new film. If everything goes well, I’ll start in October. It’s about the life of old people.

VIDEO PART TWO

JZ: Since you don’t want to tell us more about your new film, we’ll just wait and see. You used HD camera to make your first two films. We know that Apple products make it possible for individuals to make films. What do you think of the role of digital technology in filmmaking?

PT: I think film is now in the digital era. The emergence of DV camera accelerated the development of independent films both in and outside China.  It makes filmmaking more accessible.  As I said before, everyone can be a director.  But before digital camera, this is almost impossible. Traditional film technology requires a big film crew. You need a cameraman and also someone to develop the film and make copies. Digital technology makes things much easier. Postproduction is simplified.  Editing can even be finished within a couple of days.

JZ: All you need is a computer.

PT: Right. It’s also very easy to reedit the film. When I just graduated from school, I used 35mm film, and the process was very complicated …

JZ: It sounds quite far away although it was actually just several years ago. This technique is still in use?

PT: It’s different now. In school they taught us old technique in order to make us familiar with the whole process.  Now even film is digitalized and edited on computer. Then you edit the film based on the digital version.

JZ: So the process is simplified and the cost is reduced.

PT: Right.

JZ: One man and one camera can make a film. These are all the benefits brought by digital technology. As a filmmaker, what challenge do you have to face with the fast developing technology?

PT: I think so. Now filmmakers are everywhere especially independent filmmakers since you can finish a film at a very low cost. But it’s not necessarily a good film. More accessibility actually means higher requirement for the directors. You have to find a clear way to express your feeling and understand of life. Everyone can be a director, but not everyone can make an artwork.

JZ: Right. Although as you said that the development of new technology helps to lower down the cost, but making a film still need lots of money. Without financial support, you still can’t realize your dream of being a director. I know that director Peng is financed by Sundance and Rotterdam Film Festival. Can you share with us how you got support from them? We know that some European countries have funding for independent filmmakers.

PT: Yes. I did get some funding for my previous film. But I don’t know much in detail since I’m not the producer. My responsibility was to write the script. It was my producer who took care of the financing.

JZ: Litter Moth went to lots of film festivals and won many awards. Can you share with us your feeling for the success of your first film?

PT: Of course I was quite happy. I studied at Film Academy for a long time and I was eager to see if I could actually make a film. You can’t be a real filmmaker without making a film. Many people claim that they are filmmakers after graduate from Film Academy, but they don’t have a work to prove that. So little Moth is a testimony for me. It proves that what I learned from school is useful.

JZ: But if you have a very high starting point, will you … For example, Did you expect your second film to go to any film festival?

PT: My second film also went to some film festivals. The threshold of filmmaking can sometimes strangle new ideas in the cradle.  Without digital technology, when the investors look at your script, their concern is that if the film is worth millions or even ten million of investment. Of course he’s concerned about profit. For example, my first film is an art house film rather than commercial.  If no one wants to finance the film since it won’t make any money, the audience would never get a chance to see it. But in the digital era, you can finish the film with far less money.

JZ: I just came up with another question. Film foundations encourage and help independent filmmakers through providing financial support. It played an important role in producing your first film. But as you said, they are also concerned with profit, the market and audience. I guess it might have brought you some troubles. After all film is made for audience. You’ll have to think about the market. If you can’t find any funding, you’ll have to look for investors. Is there any change in the past several years?

PT: There are certainly changes. If your film doesn’t have a good box office, no one will further support your career as a director. I can’t give a definite answer to your question. It involves the struggle of the director. Sometimes I prefer to film this way, but the investors want to make it more commercial, adding some movie stars or change the script into a comedy.  The audiences like that. People are tired from work. They are looking for laughter at cinema not serious stories. So it depends on the director’s choice. Chinese audiences mostly just watch blockbusters. Not so many people care about low budget films. But the oversea market is more diversified. They not only have blockbuster commercial films but also alternative films for intellectuals or certain group of audience. They have specific audience for different kinds of films. But in China, there’s no diversity.

JZ: I don’t know if the audience will agree with me. I think when we give the audience multiple choices; we’ll gradually cultivate specific interest of our audience. It’s just a matter of time and extent. I always believe that a good film, even a non-commercial one, can be well received among its audience.  A low budget film can still get attention as long as it resonates with the audience.

PT: Right.

VIDEO PART THREE

JZ: Does anyone have any questions for Director Peng about filmmaking, about financing, about Apple products? Any kind of questions.

A1: When you are writing a script, do you try to describe the image in your mind or do you write the story first and then visualize it?

PT: My method is to imagine a picture in mind first and then put it into words. I’m always the director of my script, so I don’t have to make my script very articulate.  But for a professional scriptwriter, you can’t do it this way. You have to give the director a detailed, complete script. You must make it very clear so that other people can understand. But for me, as long as I can understand my script, it’s fine. I normally just make an outline. Doesn’t have to be very clear. Everything is in my mind. My script is just an outline.

A2: How do you pick actors? Do you find actors first or write the script first?

PT: In my case, I wrote the script first then looked for actors. But sometimes the directors would pick actors first, such as Hollywood. They have s star-based system, which means they the script is tailored to specific starts and then find someone suitable to direct the film. Hollywood always does that. But I just write the script and look for suitable actors.

A2: Did you find the little in Hubei?

PT: Yes.

JZ: We forgot to mention before. All the actors in his film are unprofessional actors.

A2: Is the boy disabled?

PT: No, he isn’t. It’s performed.

A2: Did you teach them how to act?

PT: Right. Unprofessional actors never had professional trainings before. They don’t know how to live in front of the camera. So you need to teach them. Choosing actors is very important. You should pick those who are outgoing and are interested in working with you. If they meet these requirements, you just need to guide them how to live naturally in front of the camera.

A2:  Did you find them through local connections, such as friends’ relatives?

PT: Through many ways. Some are introduced by friend, some are found by myself. The male character in Floating in Memory was found in the street. He’s the chief of a local restaurant. He was smoking downstairs he finished cooking. We happened to see him after the meal. I felt that he’s very close to the main character so I asked him if he would like to act. He was very surprised because it’s very rare to meet someone looking for actors in such a small place. He didn’t believe that. But after he found out that it was for real, he quit his job and joined my film crew.  The owner of the restaurant was quite angry because he only has one cook.

A2: Is the video we just saw from the film or just footage.

PT: It’s the trailer.

A2: Why is it on 4:3?

PT: Because it’s for TV.

A2: What camera did you use?

PT: Canon XL2.

A2: Did you correct the color?

PT: Not really. Just slightly darkened.

JZ: Did you do color correction yourself?

PT: I found someone to do it. Not too much. Just lower down the saturation.

A2: When you mail your film abroad, do you send DVD?

PT: Right. But for screening, sometimes they need the Master tape.

JZ: So many questions.

A2: Master tape is the Beta?

PT: Yes. Digital Beta.

JZ: As I know, the director just needs to prepare the DVD, but the producer should collect director’s statement, actors’ information, and introduction of the film. You should give a set of document to the film festival. Right?

PT: Yes.

A2: What are the major Film Festivals for Chinese language films that you care the most?

PT: For Chinese language films, there are only Hong Kong Film Festivals … and Taiwan Film Festival, the Golden Horse Award. Others are mainly English.

A2: Do you have to pay application fee for foreign film festivals?

PT: Yes, of course. But sometimes the festival organizer will come to China to pick films. You can give your film to them directly. The application fee is quite expensive. It’s in dollars.

JZ: Can I ask your occupation? Are you a film student?

A2:  I’ve already graduated.

JZ:  You are also a director?

A2: Yes.

JZ: Do you have your own film?

A2: I haven’t won any award yet.

JZ: Keep on trying. Other questions?

A3: What’s the target audience of your two films, international film festival or domestic audience?

PT: At the beginning, I didn’t think too much about film festivals. I just wanted to express my feeling. I just wanted to film something I really liked. I wanted to make a good script into a film.

A3: If a writer wants to express some feelings, he/she writes a book and shares it with audiences. Do you think your film is closer to Chinese or foreign audience?

PT: It’s difficult to find a boundary in art. It’s hard to say weather it belongs to the US, UK or China. Of course there’s something national. But my film is about people and human emotion. People’s emotion is always connected. Like some good foreign films, you won’t say you can’t understand them because they are acted by foreigners.

A3: I have an example. There’s an Italian film called Beautiful Life. It got lots of attention worldwide and won Best Foreign Film at Oscar. Chinese people like it a lot, but Italian people don’t think it’s an Italian film.

PT: Is there another possibility… Like The Crazy Stone is very popular in China, but Hong Kong people don’t think it’s that funny at all. They don’t quite understand what it tries to say.

A3: I understand what you mean. Jokes are regional. Like Zhou Libo’s very popular in Shanghai but people in Beijing don’t understand him.

PT: Right.

A3: But people’s emotion is the same. If the domestic audience don’t like the film … I don’t mean your film. I haven’t seen it yet. But I don’t agree that Chinese films rarely reflect the life of peasants. There are lots of films that depict the reality of China, but they don’t have enough chances to be shown.

PT: You are right. Not enough screenings.

Relevant Classroom Use

Jian Yi

Jian Yi is a filmmaker from China whose work actively engages ordinary citizens in documenting their own lives. He directed the critically acclaimed films Super, Girls! and Bamboo Shoots, and co-directed the groundbreaking China Village Documentary Project, in which ordinary villagers from across China used video cameras to record the changing rural dynamics in their home villages. Jian Yi is also the founder of the Participatory Documentary Center at Jinggangshan University and Original Studio, one of the nation’s first innovative community art centers. His documentaries and feature films, which reveal the social and cultural tensions of contemporary China, have won international awards and are shown worldwide. He is a 2010 Open Society Institute Fellow.

The video of Jian’s interview is in four parts, with an English transcript following each video. Video of Part One is below. Click through to view both videos and the full transcript. Interview conducted by Jane Zheng. Videography by Michael Cheng. English transcription and subtitles by Isabella Tianzi Cai.

Note: English subtitles for each video can be accessed by clicking on the CC button in the pop-up menu on the bottom right corner of the player.

VIDEO PART 1

JZ: The clip we saw just now was from Director Jian’s feature film Dong Sun (Bamboo Shoots), winner of the Bronze Zenith Award at the 31^st Montreal World Film Festival. So, here’s my first question for you. I know you weren’t trained as a filmmaker. In fact, your film career spans over a wide range of related jobs. For example, you have worked as an editor, a production assistant, a producer, and also a curator for film festivals all around the world. What got you started in making films?

JY: Let me first apologize for showing you clips with only English subtitles, especially for the second one, because some of you may not understand Jiangxi dialect. Now, to answer your question, let me use this film as an example. What motivated me to make this film was a wish to realize in film what couldn’t be realized in real life. I have an uncle who works as a provincial-level civil servant. I visited him once and remember seeing at his home many local foods that weren’t available in the local marketplaces. I was curious about where they came from. I was sure that my uncle didn’t get them directly from villagers of nearby villages. It was possible that they got passed from villagers to village-level chiefs, then from village-level chiefs to town-level chiefs, and from town-level chiefs to municipal-level government officials, and from municipal-level government officials to provincial-level government officials. This chain of events must have taken place or else, the oranges would not have ended up where they were. In my film Dong Sun (Bamboo Shoots), a condom and a package of bamboo shoots replace the oranges.  These two objects travel from a remote village to a large city, passing many hands during the process.

To digress a little here, I am a very insecure person. Nothing in the modern world makes me feel safe. This sense of insecurity comes from everything around me, including the food I eat, the things I drink, the clothes I wear, even the house I live in.  It is also this sense of insecurity that makes me want to start a non-profit organization with a pseudonym – fang xin (literally means setting one’s mind at ease). I implanted this idea in my story. The characters in the story all feel acutely insecure because everything they eat and drink including baby milk powder can be unsafe. As a result of that, they begin their personal journeys to self-salvation, knowing that no one else is able to help them with these problems. That’s why I also think that this film can be correctly termed as a salvation or redemption film because you are the only person who can redeem yourself.

JZ:  What about your other film Chao Ji Nü Sheng (Super, Girls!)? What gave birth to that story?

JY: That project started off because of the popular singing competition Chao Ji Nü Sheng (Super, Girls!) on TV. I enjoy watching it very much now. Initially I wasn’t a fan. I even told my friends who watched this show that this show was for ingénues. But everything changed in 2005 when I sat through one episode. In 2006, I started shooting my documentary Chao Ji Nü Sheng (Super, Girls!).

JZ: During the shooting, did you follow one specific girl or a group of girls? In the clip that you just showed us, many girls seem to have been interviewed.

JY: I followed the competition as it took place. First I was in Shenyang, then Guangzhou. If I am not wrong, I was the only independent videographer among everyone else who was there filming of the competition. Most were from official broadcasting agencies. In fact, because my video camera was big, sometimes people mistook me as one of them. When I was unlucky, I got kicked out; but when I was lucky, everything went smoothly. I followed five participants mainly. Among them, Wong Yulan was the focus. I think she is a very interesting person. On the day that she passed the preliminary round of the singing competition, she noticed that there weren’t enough pencils to go around. She went to buy hundreds of pencils and then sold them to her fellow participants at the competition.

JZ: How smart of her. That’s certainly someone with a business mind.

JY: Certainly. She knew too that she and I could use each other for our own gains. My observation tells me that her generation is highly aware of the media. For her in this case, she was right to think that my camera would help her sell her pencils. And she was able to accept the presence of my camera quite readily.

JZ: I would like to congratulate you on your achievements of both your feature film and your documentary, for I know that both of these films were given awards at world film festivals and screened in many places. From the perspective of a filmmaker though, the making of a feature film and that of a documentary can be very different in nature, both in terms of the plot and the presentation. How are you able to excel at and succeed in doing both? Could you share some of your experiences with us?

JY: I don’t consider myself a success at both. Many brilliant and excellent filmmaker s are out there. I really don’t consider myself as one of them. I like to do what I like, of things that I think about. That’s why it doesn’t really matter to me whether I’m making feature films, documentaries, oral histories, or photography for that matter. I will use my dream non-profit organization fang xin here as an example. I really like the idea and I constantly think about it. Though I am unable to realize this dream at the present, or in other words, I am unable to redeem myself right now, I am free to fictionalize it in my feature film, as a way of self-salvation for the characters in the story. This explains how and why I was motivated to make the film.

JZ: I see. You mean to let form serve content.

JY: Exactly. Fang xin may never be realized. If it did, it might corrupt pretty easily.

JZ: Like 315 (315 refers to China Consumer Association).

JY: It could be.

JZ: I know besides making art, you are also involved in all kinds of social projects. For instance, together with documentary director Wu Guanguang, you started a project called “Chronicling Villagers’ Images.” Could you share more about this project with us please? Who are your targeted villagers? And what are the mandates of the project? Additionally, how is it going now?

JY:  We began this project in 2005. I met Wu Guanguang in 2004. From 2003 to 2006, I was part of an EU team whose mission in China was to follow Chinese village-level elections, and my job there mostly had to do with media relations. While I was on that job, I took many photographs, which few filmmakers or cinematographers could have had the opportunity to do the same. With ample time, a wealth of funds, and many valuable networks on hand, I obtained easy footage wherever I went.

In the first year, I did it on my own. People who live in China may know this: when I arrive at a place to do some films, I need to report to the provincial-level Civil Administration Office first; afterwards, someone from that office will inform the municipal-level Civil Administration Office about my arrival; from there, someone from the municipal-level civil administration office will inform an even lower Civil Administration Office about my arrival. This process basically continues until I get to whoever is in charge of the village that I want to visit.

Often by the time I met any villagers, it would be very late at night because a whole day had been wasted on meeting all the intermediate people, and some twenty civil servants often would sit with me at the table for a meal prepared for all of us by the villagers. During the second year that I was at this job, I organized a national photography competition simply because after so many similar incidences like this one, I came to the realization that what I could see with my own eyes was very limited. I wished to see what others saw. The results were not as good as I expected because many who participated submitted works that weren’t as illuminating as I thought they would.

It was around then that I met Wu Guanguang. I consider Wu to be like most of the people who participated in my competition, but he suggested to me that we can hand the cameras to villagers and let them film themselves. At the moment, I thought his suggestion amounted most to a change of mode of representation and nothing much. But Wu carried it out and matured as he did it. He knew many advertising agencies. He was also someone famous.

We made announcements of this project, and the response was good. The project was for ten specially selected peasants, each of whom would travel to Beijing and be given a free video camera and a free ten-day crash course on how to use video cameras. We planned to give them a month’s time to work on their own films in their native villages. After their time was up, they would be requested to come back to Beijing again where we would teach them how to edit their footage into a ten-minute short film in Wu’s studio.

VIDEO PART 2

JZ: I have noticed that you are not always interested in working with professional filmmakers, actors, etc. for your projects. Instead, you pick real people living real lives. Is it alright for me to make a connection between your filmmaking practices and your area of study in school, as well as your concern with contemporary sociopolitical issues?

JY: Yes, perhaps there is such a link. I was in a master’s degree program in International Peace Studies in the United States from 1997 to 1998. I don’t think it’s a program that many choose to go. I went because of the full scholarship that they offered to me. After I went, however, it became almost inevitable that I would be reformed in one way or another. Even though we studied international political issues, I realized that a lot of the materials that we covered were closely linked to basic human needs and shared universal values. So after my studies, I felt that I had gone through a big transformation. So . . . .

JZ: So perhaps that’s what made you return to your hometown Ji’an after graduation and set up Participatory Documentary Center with the support of Jinggangshan University. I think I see a vague resemblance between this organization and your collaboration with Wu Guanguang to teach villagers to shoot films. How is this center doing right now?

JY: Let me say more about the organization. In 2008, I lived in New York for half a year. It was another transformative period in my life. While I was there, I attended many film screenings, art exhibits, etc. I noticed that like Beijing, New York had a great number of people working in the entertainment industry. While some of them seemed to have worked to entertain themselves, others worked to entertain others. As it is often said, where there is a lot of money, there is a lot of people. Unfortunately, I am not a people’s person skilled at entertaining people.

While I was in the U.S., I visited a non-profit multi-disciplinary arts and education center called Appalshop in Kentucky. They produce documentaries, videos, among other things. They have been around for over forty years and have over 100 documentaries in their collection. They are located in a very small town called Whitesberg in Kentucky. It is so small that in China we may not even call it a town! The place is rich in coal, and people who live there have a history that goes back a long time, and often they are very conservative and very poor too.

My visit to Appalshop inspired me greatly, so after I returned to China from New York, I went back to my hometown, hoping to start a similar organization like Appalshop there, instead of staying in Beijing, which is a city that I had lived for 15 years. In October 2008, Participatory Documentary Center was formally established. It has five branches: documenting films, documenting photography, documenting oral history, documenting theater houses, and documentary village architecture and infrastructure in our socialist regime.

JZ: Documentary filmmaking must be the biggest component of your work at Participatory Documentary Center. Can I say that marketing and global outreaching are also quite important?

JY: Yes. To me, going back to my hometown to start this non-governmental organization is a very natural thing to do. As I mentioned a minute ago, both in Beijing and in New York, many people are working in the entertainment industry. I lack the appropriate spirit to work a job in the entertainment industry. I want to go to a small place to work, and I know that most Chinese don’t live in big cities like Beijing. In the beginning, it was a lot of hard work. As people all know, independent films and non-profit organizations are not easy. When you tell your local government that you want to establish a non-profit organization, your local government is likely to be suspicious about your organization. What don’t you want to make money? They ask. Conversely, they welcome organizations that have making profits as their agenda.

JZ: Ji’an is a relatively small city. The standard of living there isn’t as high as it is here. How did people there react when your first opened Participatory Documentary Center? Were they willing to participate or were they hesitant to?

JY: In the beginning they did not really understand what we were trying to do. We wanted to make it entertaining for them, but at the same time, we had to live up to our mission. That was why we could not be like some of the local television programs that catered to entertainment mainly. We run our organization bilaterally. Sometimes locals approach us and seek out opportunities to work with us, other times we approach them and persuade them to participate in our projects. To us, the most important thing is not making documentaries but making changes. We wish that our presence in this small place can help people rediscover themselves as deeply sympathetic creatures and help the local community strengthen itself.

I think that in today’s capitalist culture, interpersonal relationships have become very fragile. True, the world today is full of problems. But do we ask ourselves what we can do to improve the situation? When we speak of bad people around us, do we think about our own actions? I have a notion that the badness that we see in the world is a reflection of the badness inherent in ourselves. You can look at a photograph here taken by a high school student. Here is another one of a participant and one of our journalists.

JZ: He is an old man.

YZ: Right, that is our oldest participant. You can see the point that our goal is not to make documentaries but to build the community and strengthen interpersonal relationships. Ji’an can be summarized into eight words: sheng guan fa chai ma jiang da pai (get promotion, get rich, play mahjongg, and play cards). It could be true in other parts of China including Beijng too. These words tell us how ordinary people think and live their lives. We wish that our oral history projects or other kinds of effective use of video could awaken people from their mundane existence and start questioning themselves. We wish that they will come to some kind of self-reflection in the process.

Ultimately, we wish to open a museum about this city and its people, one that keeps alive the cultural and historical records of the city by its people. Nowadays we are flooded with television series of famous people in the past, but we do not know how life was like for ordinary people back then. The goal of our oral history project is exactly to capture ordinary people’s stories and experiences. Our documentaries are divided into two categories. One is for participants who film their own lives on a yearly basis; the other is for our young filmmakers who film local organizations for longer periods of time. For instances, one young documentarian filmed a hospital, some others filmed schools. They keep going back to these organizations year after year to complete their documentaries.

JZ: A long-term engagement in a sense. Through the images left today, we can reconstruct the life of the people in the future. They will all become valuable documents.

VIDEO PART 3

JZ: Since we are now in Apple Store, could you also talk about how digital technologies have facilitated your organization in achieving its goals?

JY: One advantage of digital technology is that it is cheap. It makes it easy to buy and own a video camera rather than having to rent a film camera. It is easy to carry. Its size makes it more suitable for documentary filmmaking than large-sized film cameras. I will show you another documentary we made last year to illustrate what I mean. This documentary is about China’s meat market. We consume more and more meat nowadays, both in terms of the varieties and the qualities. The documentary explores the relation between meat consumption and the climate. It was screened at last year’s Copenhagen Climate Summit just after it had been edited.

(Clip)

JY: This film lasts twenty some minutes. I shot it in Jiangxi. The man in the picture used to raise pigs. She said that she ate meat every day. Without meat, her meals are bland.

JZ: Did you use high definition video camera for this documentary?

JY: Yes. We also brought an Apple laptop with us as we shot. I had had the laptop for three years. We were able to transfer our raw footage to the laptop whenever we wanted. As for editing, we used Final Cut Pro. In this scene the owner of the pig farm was giving injections to his pigs. A pig has to take many injections in its lifetime, just like us. We stepped into this pig farm quite casually, and this was what we saw.

JZ: Did you hold the camera during the shooting?

JY: No. This gentleman here did. The man you saw just now was a very young entrepreneur. He smells great profit in this business. He owns the largest butcher house in the town. He wants to open the biggest pig farm in the town as well.

JZ: I’m interested in how big your team was in the making of this documentary.

JY: We wanted to have it as small as we could. We had five people who were permanent staff. Sometimes on set we only had four.

JZ: How long did it take to make this twenty-minute documentary with your five-member team?

JY: It took us half a month.

JZ: We have many videographers here today who are also interested in making their own documentaries or feature films. Besides the advantages that you just mentioned about digital technologies, could you also share with us the drawbacks too? Especially their limitation on creativity?

JY: Certainly there are drawbacks, for example, the quality of video is not as good as film. To me, film means something different from what most people perceive it to be. I guess most people are concerned with the quality of sound and images. But I am concerned with the content. For the content that you see here, if you had chosen to film it with large professional video or film cameras, this would have turned out a completely different film.

JZ: So you are more concerned with the realist portrayal that portable video cameras are able to deliver.

JY: Yes, I would say so. After my wife and I finished shooting this film…

JZ: Jian Yi’s wife is sitting among us here today.

JY: …she and I converted to vegetarians. Dr. Yu who is here with us has a bungalow in Beijing. We interviewed him too. He also became a vegetarian in the aftermath. But what’s most interesting is that towards the end of the shooting when the entire production crew was in Guangzhou, we experienced the most transformative moment of our time together. My wife Song Lin and I were gravely impacted by what we had seen. We weren’t able to bite into another piece of meat. It is like after you have seen the truth and know the truth, eating what you used to take for granted becomes nearly impossible.

So on the last day, I took over the video camera and pointed it at my crew. It made them extremely uncomfortable, and they roared! Why? What we eat is private. We are afraid of letting others see what we eat because we do not like being judged by others. Food is something we intake every day; nothing is more private than it. That was why my crew found being filmed intolerable.

JZ: Such emotions were uncontrollable.

JY: Exactly. This will go on to show that our goal in making documentaries is to establish intimate and genuine interpersonal relationships. The most meaningful thing about making this documentary is this last moment when everybody who was involved felt being influenced and transformed.

JZ: From the works that you have done, I can see that you have always wanted to make your personal experience part of the creative process. The two always go together and influence each other. Now let’s turn the floor to everyone else in the room.

VIDEO PART 4

JZ: After having seen Director Jian Yi’s works and listened to him talking about his filming experiences, what questions do you have for him? We will pass the microphone to anyone with a question. Now let’s begin.

Man #1: What is your goal?

JY: My goal?

Man #1: Yes. And second, what do you wish to express today?

JZ: What does he wish to express today?

JY: (Jokingly) My talk must be really lousy today. Well, one thing that had been on my mind all the while was that I only had half an hour. Half an hour was all I had.

JZ: Let me try to rephrase the question a little. Did you want to ask Director Jian Yi what he wishes to express through his works, which he just showed us today?

Man #1: The screening went by quite fast. I wasn’t able to understand what drove you to do such projects. What thoughts do you have behind them?

JY: My goal, let me see. Well, as I mentioned earlier, all the works that I do concerns me in one way or another. I have never felt like searching for a topic so as to film it. I would never go to a remote village and set a goal to film it because the village would not be something that I am truly familiar with. I am not saying that that village is unimportant. I only mean that I am not inclined to challenge myself to film something that I have no knowledge of. I like to start from myself and what I can see. I picture myself as a tiny molecule, perhaps one of the tiniest, in this big world. I would like to open up the rest of the world from me. For instance, I started from the things I ate. If you also try it, you will see that it could be quite a formidable project at first.

JZ: It is like a self-dissecting process in front of others.

JY: Not yet in front of others, only in front of myself.

Woman #1: I can sense from your talk that you have a personal philosophy that runs undercurrent throughout your work. Maybe this personal philosophy isn’t totally explicable. It’s common to many of us. That’s probably why people shoot documentaries, write music, and so on and so forth. I want to say that what you have been doing and your persistent input in making feature films and documentaries are admirable. For most people including me, even though we also have similar insightful moments in life, where our smooth-running everyday life ruptures to reveal something much deeper – for example, we feel being treated unfairly in society – we do not have the means and talent to capture those moments and make them widely known. My question for you is about your next step or your next goal. Where are you being led?

JY: What we are doing now is already a lot of work. That’s part of the reason that I don’t have in mind what my next project is going to be. As I mentioned earlier, our work (at Participatory Documentary Center) is divided into five parts. Making documentaries is only one of them. Photography is also part of our work, like the photographs that were produced by elementary school and middle school students. Besides those, we have oral history and documenting theater productions. Whatever you film, you are mediated by video cameras. But for documenting theater productions, the presence of video cameras isn’t going to be that strong. As for documenting architecture, architecture itself is already a strong link between people and the environment that they live in.

JZ: What about your ultimate goal?

JY: That’s not easy to say. I used to word “roar” earlier on. I don’t think what we are doing is simply roaring. If that was what we wanted, we would be not doing what are doing. I think that there are many things that worth roaring right now and there are many brave people who are roaring. But despite what they do, they are doing it onto others, not to themselves. How much of our time do we spend asking ourselves what we can do to help? How do changes happen in society? I don’t think our society is an automatic running machine that runs on its own but is run by people like you and me. That’s why I really don’t think that what we do is simply roaring.

Woman #1: “Roaring”  is probably not an appropriate term. What I meant was a kind of roaring that requires spiritual inspirations, which ordinary people don’t experience much. For those who don’t have a much deeper understanding of the world, they may not have the ability or even the means to do the same work as you do. The act of roaring isn’t the language of roaring. I have another comment too. You want to document the history and culture of a small city. If you succeed in doing it, what you do will give us ordinary people a sense of empowerment and entitlement to our own history and culture. This is especially meaningful and important to people like me who are not from Beijing, Shanghai, and other big metropolitans. You are the first to start this kind of project and this kind of organization independent of the state, which always imposes restraints on similar projects and organizations. Thank you.

JZ: Let’s say your organization really grows and matures a few years from now, do you wish to start another one of its kind in a different city? Is that in your plan?

JY: I have had such a thought before. But it is already not easy to do it well in just one city, so I stopped dreaming about such things. I honestly think that by being there, our organization is already a success. And it could be just because of the fact that the people working there feel changed every day by doing what they do. Maybe what we do seems similar to what the local broadcasting agencies do, for instance, local community DV’s. But we are actually very different from them in essence. We are stationed in the local community whereas the local broadcasting agencies assign people to work on projects – these people will come and go.

Another point that I want to add is that as you probably know, independent documentaries do not reach a wide audience. A lot of the times, independent filmmakers could only show their works to one another. It is a closed and limited circle of people. However, from my father, I was able to change the way that I viewed independent documentaries. My sister and I bought a video camera as a gift for our father and let him film our grandmother. He had a bad relationship with her because she disapproved his marriage in the old days. She lived in an old folks’ home. Old folks’ home is a new phenomenon in China. This one became a quite extraordinary place for my father. He filmed her for a year there, during which I wished to see a change in their relationship for the better. Unfortunately what I wished didn’t happen because she passed away in the midst of it.

However, my father’s experience during this year changed his view on documentaries. In the past, he had not been interested in watching documentaries. In fact, he had had no concept of what a documentary was. After that year, he became interested in documentaries and watched every documentary that I stored at home. What I learned from my father is that my team and I are not only developing a documentary-making community but also developing our own audience, both of which are genuinely for community building.

JZ: In other words, the work acquires personal and communal meanings.

JY: That’s right. I think that it’s pointless to make films without people who can actually watch them. Those films won’t have the chance to influence people that way.

JZ: Right. Are there any more questions? Well, thanks for everyone who is here and Director Jian who shares his works and his experiences with us. Are you willing to give some conclusive remarks for today – for the coming of the Chinese New Year?

JY: Everything we do is to establish and strength interpersonal relationships. We have a small project called “Passing the Video Camera Project” right now. Many people today who have old digital cameras and old video cameras with resolutions ranging from 8 to 10 megapixels do not use them anymore. These old machines sit in their homes or get thrown out. We collect such old cameras and pass them on to children, young people, etc. in our community who seem interested. So if anyone today is willing to donate, please contact us.

JZ: That’s really meaningful. Thanks Director Jian again. Even though the event is quite short today, it is significant. I hope sincerely here that you will succeed in doing what you are doing and achieving your goal(s) in the future. And I hope that everyone here today will also succeed in your own filed. During the past three days, we have had dialogues with a bunch of independent filmmakers. I could see that all of them are very persevering. They all know clearly what they want. In my personal opinion, people who know what they want and who strive to achieve it with perseverance will succeed ultimately. Thanks everyone. Thanks, Director Jian.

Anchor: Thanks Director Jian for showing us his films and having a dialogue with us. Thanks everyone for coming to Apple Store to participate in our events. I hope you all like it and continue to participate in our future events. So thank everyone.

JZ: If anyone is interested in knowing more about the Participatory Documentary Center, we have some brochures at the back too. Thank you.

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