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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Perfect Life (2009, dir. Emily Tang)

In the online film journal Electric Sheep, John Berra reports on the China Independent Film Festival held last October in Nanjing. He describes the festival, now in its seventh year, as a semi-secret state of affairs:

As not every film in the line-up has received the stamp of approval from the Film Bureau of the State Administration for Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), this celebration of Chinese cinema occurs under the political radar, and the lack of the promotion means that many students of Nanjing University are not aware that an important film festival is taking place on their campus until a few banners appear in the days leading up to the event. However, the festival organisers somehow manage to make this ‘invisible’ festival sufficiently noticeable and 2010 screenings were well-attended, leading to a series of productive Q&A sessions with the filmmakers in attendance and valuable networking events.

Berra singles out several films for praise, starting with Perfect Life, directed by Emily Tang and executive produced by Jia Zhangke:

Jia Zhangke served as the executive producer of Perfect Life, and the fusion of fact and fiction recalls his masterpieces Platform (2000) and 24 City (2008), but Tang steps out of the shadow of her financial benefactor by imbuing proceedings with an element of magical realism as the real and the imagined eventually come to co-exist.

Berra also praises  Zhao Dayong’s The High Life, Zhou Hao’s Cop Shop (both directors have films distributed by dGenerate), as well as Rivers and My Father, Piercing, Single Man, Red White, On the Road and Once Upon a Time Proletarian.

Berra concludes with some thoughts on the evolving political significance of holding such a festival, and its shift from being totally “underground” to “independent,” as reflected in its “hidden in plain sight” status, and in the content of the films:

The 7th China Independent Film Festival served to emphasise that alternative production in China is very much in a state of transition, moving from an ideologically charged ‘underground’ movement to a self-sustained ‘independent’ sector. Although still politicised, the sector is not only showing signs of the formation of its own industrial networks but an awareness of how to work around the state, rather than to stubbornly work against it. This is evident in the manner in which a wider political context was absent from many of the films and documentaries in the festival, although this presumptive measure to side-step the restrictions of SARFT is also a political statement in itself.

Read the full festival report at Electric Sheep.

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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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Spring Fever (dir. Lou Ye)

In the new issue of Senses of Cinema, Chris Berry offers a review of the 6th China Independent Film Festival, held this past October in Nanjing. An excerpt:

By international standards CIFF is a relatively small and under-resourced event. Screenings are scattered across a range of minor colleges, art galleries and museums in Nanjing, a former capital up the Yangtze from Shanghai. This year, approximately 70 experimental films, documentaries and dramatic features, almost all of them low-budget Chinese films, were included. Lou Ye’s Chunfeng Chenzui de Yewan (Spring Fever) won the Best Film award, and Ying Liang’s Hao Mao (Good Cats) and Zhang Jianchi’s Bai Qingting (Take Me to Vietnam) shared the Jury Prize. Anywhere else in the world, such an event would be a minor festival attracting little if any international coverage. But the very particular circumstances of China mean that CIFF can claim to be the most important film festival in the country.

Berry goes on to explain the significance of the festival’s programming, describes the collegiate atmosphere of the community forged by the festival, and identifies trends in Chinese independent filmmaking as reflected in the festival lineup. As a fellow attendee of the festival, I can attest to the festival’s extraordinary atmosphere and a special sense of camaraderie cultivated among its participating artists.

The rest of Berry’s report can be found at Senses of Cinema.

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

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

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

Main program of films follows after the break.

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

Special Feature
Li Hongqi: Golden Week
Zhao Ye: Jalainur

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

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

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

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