Ghost Town (dir. Zhao Dayong)

Following its triumphant US Premiere at the 2009 New York Film Festival, Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town will enjoy a weeklong run at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The MoMA will screen Ghost Town at the following dates:

• Monday, March 15, 2010, 3 p.m.
• Wednesday, March 17, 2010, 4 p.m.
• Thursday, March 18, 2010, 7 p.m.
• Friday, March 19, 2010, 3:30 p.m.
• Saturday, March 20, 2010, 4 p.m.
• Sunday, March 21, 2010, 12:30 p.m.

Tickets can be purchased at the MoMA Film Box Office adjacent to the The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY. Details at the MoMA site.

Further details and trailer after the break.

Zhao’s tremendously rewarding film illuminates the alienation and marginalization of the denizens of one of China’s countless remote villages. Divided into three parts, this epic documentary takes an intimate look at its varied cast of characters, bringing audiences face to face with people who were unceremoniously left behind by China’s new economy. Zhao displays great compassion and respect for the squatters and other inhabitants of the village, and he patiently teases out the special places and attachments to which they cling. Cleverly structured and beautifully shot, the film is a gratifying, if ultimately heartbreaking, testimonial to the talent and commitment of China’s vanguard independent documentary movement.

• Description from the MoMA program
• Ghost Town page at dGenerate Films
• Reviews of Ghost Town from the New York Film Festival
• Interview with director Zhao Dayong
• Interview with producer David Bandurski

Trailer:

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In the conversation, Zhao discussed the situation of independent filmmaking in China, his experiences in painting, installation, and performance art and their influence on his later choice in filmmaking, as well as his recent project about the underground Nigerian Christian community in Guangzhou.

Concerning the three-part structure of the film, Zhao insisted that the film was less a quote unquote documentary than a reflection of his experience living in the community, presented from a “clear, subjective concept” of him. Zhao also expressed his wish for Chinese independent filmmakers to “be persistent, to insist on making good quality films.”

The complete interview can be accessed here.

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To all of you in attendance, thanks for coming out. Your support has helped put the newest vanguard of Chinese independent filmmaking on the map. If you feel Ghost Town deserves to be seen by a wider audience, whether on the big or small screen, please get in touch with us or pass the word to your fellow film enthusiasts, professors, programmers, curators, critics, and acquisition colleagues.

Here are some photos from both the screening as well as the post-screening reception at Bamboo 52.

Post-film Q&A: (From L to R) Zhao Dayong, translator Vincent Cheng, J. Hoberman (NYFF)

Post-film Q&A: (From L to R) Filmmaker Zhao Dayong, translator Vincent Cheng, J. Hoberman (NYFF)

Ghost Town Reception: (From L to R) Nick Chin, Chris Au (DGF), Jo Mei, J.P. Chan, Karin Chien (DGF)

Ghost Town Reception: (From L to R) Chris Au (DGF), Dennis Lim (NYFF), Kevin Lee (DGF), Marian Masone (NYFF) Karin Chien (DGF), Zhao Dayong

Bandurski brothers Jonathan and Ghost Town producer David

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The screening is being co-sponsored by the fine folks at Stranger than Fiction, a documentary series at the IFC Center curated by Thom Powers.  For the past ten years, STF has presented an eclectic mix of documentaries (followed by filmmaker discussions!), and has cemented its place as a gathering spot for New York’s independent film community.  Thanks for supporting Ghost Town, STF!

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Jury members Dennis Lim and Scott Foundas had this to say about the film:

• “Ghost Town is one of the most surprising and rewarding films I’ve seen all year, one of the most important films to have emerged from the booming (but still underexplored) field of Chinese independent documentaries.” – Dennis Lim, film critic, Editor of Moving Image Source, New York Film Festival selection committee member

• “I didn’t think there was another Jia Zhangke or Wang Bing lurking out there, but it turns out there is!” – Scott Foundas, film critic, Film Editor of L.A.Weekly, New York Film Festival selection committee member

Click here for more information on Ghost Town.

Click here to buy tickets to the New York Film Festival.

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Ghost Town (photo courtesy of Fanhall Films)

Marking a breakthrough for the Chinese digital filmmaking community, director Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town (Fei Cheng, 2008) was selected for the 47^th New York Film Festival (September 25 – October 11), as the only Chinese entry in the lineup. This low-budget documentary shot on HD has never been shown in any major festival outside China; as of this article it has yet to even appear on IMDb and All Movie Guide. Yet it joins a prestigious NYFF lineup that features new works by renowned directors such as Alain Resnais, Pedro Almodovar, Jacques Rivette, and Lars von Trier. Its inclusion in the NYFF represents a first in the festival’s program: a nod to China’s digital generation of documentary filmmakers.

According to the website of Fanhall Films, a multi-faceted indie film support organization based in Beijing, the three-hour documentary is not about phantoms, but the Lisu and Nu minority villagers in the abandoned halls of a remote former communist county seat in the southwestern province of Yunnan, China. Consisting of three chapters, “Voices,” “Recollections,” and “Innocence,” the film observes and records the mode of existence of the nameless and the forgotten, offering extraordinary insights into such topics as religious faith, relationships, juvenile deviants, generational differences, and lost history.

Dennis Lim, a member of this year’s NYFF jury and a major voice in promoting Chinese independent cinema, shared his reasons for selecting the film with dGenerate Films’ Kevin Lee: “Ghost Town is one of the most surprising and rewarding films I’ve seen all year, one of the most important films to have emerged from the booming (but still underexplored) field of Chinese independent documentaries.” Fellow jury member Scott Foundas also considered the film an exciting discovery, exclaiming: “I didn’t think there was another Jia Zhangke or Wang Bing lurking out there, but it turns out there is!”

“Out there” refers to the ever mysterious but increasingly accessible world of Chinese cinema. As one of the most selective film festivals in the world, NYFF has the reputation of showcasing the best in world cinema, usually handpicked from Cannes and Venice. Films from Greater China have occupied a small but consistent place in the festival for more than a decade. Mainland directors Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, Taiwanese directors Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang and Edward Yang, as well as Hong Kong directors Wong Kar-wai and Johnnie To have all made multiple appearances at the event. Yet almost all of them earned the entrance after being embraced by major European film festivals and championed by influential critics like J. Hoberman and Tony Rayns, or popular American directors like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino. Their global recognition is in line with NYFF’s taste, which is oriented towards spotlighting the most elite of international auteurs. (This year’s opening and closing directors, Resnais and Almodóvar, are making their tenth and eighth appearances in the event, respectively.)

A distinct breakthrough occurred at NYFF in 2000 with Jia Zhangke, who entered with his independently produced second feature Platform (Zhan Tai, 2000), after he was officially banned from filmmaking in China and virtually unknown to the rest of the world. In the years to follow, Jia would join the rank of the festival’s most beloved alumni, with four features (Platform, Unknown Pleasures [2002], The World [2004], 24 City [2008]) and one documentary (Useless, 2007) showcased in a mere eight years. Last year’s program dubbed him as the “dean of Chinese independent cinema.” As Zhang Zhen, NYU professor in Cinema Studies, has aptly noted in her book The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, Jia Zhangke’s appearance in the late 1990s helped inagurate a new phase in the Chinese indie movement. Jia and his filmmaking collective championed “amateur cinema” (yeyu dianying), or “unofficial cinema” (minjian dianying). They found a following among emerging filmmakers outside of the elite Beijing Film Academy in particular and professional filmmaking in general, joining forces with an incipient DV movement. Zhao Dayong, a director with a background in fine art who works from his private Dayong Film Studio and serves as director, cinematographer, and editor of his own films, belongs to this burgeoning amateur generation, the digital generation.

The NYFF’s choice of Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town takes its embrace of Chinese indie cinema a step further, by bringing much needed attention to documentaries. As distributor of several Chinese indie docs, dGenerate Films has worked extensively with the Chinese independent community; these interactions are depicted in the web series “Digital Underground in the People’s Republic,” which is viewable online. Critics and scholars have taken notice of this scene, such as Chris Berry, one of the first scholars to chart the ascendance of the Fifth Generation directors back in the 1980s. In an interview with Kevin Lee for dGenerate’s CinemaTalk series, Berry said:

For me independent documentary has been the most powerful force in Chinese film for quite a long time now, not only in the documentaries themselves but also in their impact on the style of most interesting fiction feature films.  So when you think about someone like Jia Zhangke, who in fact crosses both documentary making and fiction filmmaking, he would be exemplary of what I’m talking about.

In another CinemaTalk inteview, Lu Xinyu, one of the foremost scholars of Chinese independent documentary, gave her account of the significance of these films:

Now we are facing the dramatic transformation of Chinese society, both temporally and spatially.  Everyone’s life is inevitably involved in and affected by this process.  How should art react to these changes?

By watching independent documentaries, we not only experience the psychological world of the directors, but also get to experience the existence of people at different social levels through the lens of the camera, especially the existence of the underclass and how they struggled through these changes, their pains and their needs.  This is extremely important to me.

Based on the description of Ghost Town, all of these factors seem to be in play in the film. In the “Director’s Statement,” Zhao summarized his mixed feelings toward China’s development and economic boom typical of a generation of filmmakers: “I wanted to explore the idea of these lost histories and ravaged cultures, and by extension my own cultural identity, by delving into the lives and spirit of the abandoned city.”

Zhao’s depiction of contemporary China in Ghost Town will provide a stark counterpoint to the Festival’s special showcase: a retrospective of classic Chinese films from 1949-1966 to mark the 60^th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.  (This is the third major retrospective of Chinese cinema to be showcased by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in the last five years, following the NYFF tribute to the Shaw Brothers Studios in 2004, and the FSLC celebration of Chinese cinema’s centennial in 2005.) Combining cinema from the propagandist past and the documentary present, this year’s New York Film Festival will allow audiences a unique opportunity to see how far China has come, historically, socially, and cinematically.

dGenerate Films is proud to announce the premiere of Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town at the prestigious New York Film Festival.  This marks the introduction of a major new talent to western audiences.  dGenerate Films will be working with Zhao Dayong and the Ghost Town team on their US distribution and festival run.  If you’re interested in screening Ghost Town at your festival or venue, please contact us.

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