1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

France Pepper gives Du Haibin’s 1428 a strong review for the Asian Educational Media Service:

Du’s down-to-earth lens leaves you practically feeling the dust of the earthquake in your lungs. He portrays the reality of daily life as early as ten days after the earthquake where people are salvaging pieces of metal with their bare hands from collapsed buildings and selling them to buy food….

This documentary is especially informative when studying contemporary Chinese society.  We see, for example, how the government still plays a major role in shaping public attitude towards the communist party.   At the same time, it takes a close-up look at the lives of ordinary people. This two-tiered perspective is emblematic of how many aspects of Chinese society play out in reality, not just during the aftermath of an earthquake, but in everyday life.

1428 continues its three week tour of the US, with director Du Haibin appearing at select locations. Special thanks to New York University and Reel China for sponsoring Du’s visit.

Here is this week’s schedule:

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12th
Stanford University, California
Pigott Hall
Main Quad, Building 260, Room 113
Director Du Haibin to attend
http://events.stanford.edu/events/247/24793/

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13th
SF Asia Society
Chinatown YMCA
855 Sacramento St.
San Francisco CA 94108
(415) 576-9622
http://www.ymcasf.org/chinatown/

FRIDAY-SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15
Cinema Studies Screening Room
721 Broadway, 6th floor
New York University, New York
Director Du Haibin to attend

This screening opens “Reel China, 5th Documentary Biennial at NYU”
Fri-Sunday: Oct 15-18
NYU Center for Religion and Media/Cinema Studies
http://crm.as.nyu.edu/object/crm.events.screenings

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16th
Maysles Cinema
343 Lenox Ave
Ground Fl., New York, NY 10027
(212) 582-6050
http://www.mayslesinstitute.org/cinema/calendar.html
Co-sponsored by Weatherhead East Asian Institute: http://www.columbia.edu/weai/

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17th
*screening Umbrella*
Union Docs
322 Union Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11206
(718) 395-7902
http://www.uniondocs.org/
Master Class/Workshop led by Kevin Lee to follow
Director Du Haibin to attend

The tour continues next week at Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. See the full tour schedule: http://dgeneratefilms.com/events/1428-tours-the-u-s-in-october/

Relevant Classroom Use

Buried (dir. Wang Libo)

Wang Libo’s film Buried was one of the prizewinners of the 2009 Beijing Documentary Film Festival. This probing documentary was made in the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that shook Sichuan province (an event covered in detail by Du Haibin’s 1428, playing next month at the Los Angeles Film Festival). The film is now available in its entirety on YouTube; it’s embedded in its entirety on our site, following the break.

Instead of focusing directly at the Sichuan earthquake, Wang’s film looks back at controversies surrounding the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake that killed over 200,000 people. Using a range of expert testimonies, Wang builds a provocative argument that Chinese officials had significant information forewarning of an imminent earthquake, but did not take sufficient action to help prevent the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. The implications of the film’s conclusions bear heavily on the Chinese government’s handling of both the Tangshan and the Sichuan earthquake. Buried leaves disturbing questions about the power and responsibility of government in disaster management.

Director’s Statement:

The 1976 Tangshan Earthquake left a lot of open questions. Before the earthquake, seismological personnel in Tangshan and quake experts in Beijing had already warned of an imminent quake. But in the end, more than 240,000 people had to pay with their lives, causing a shocking tragedy of massive proportions. Why did this happen? In the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake about 100,000 people were killed. Faced with terrible quakes, the human race repeats tragedy time and time again. It is terrible that people can only offer money and bland tears after the disaster – when better preparation could have saved lives. A nation has to courageously face its own weakness to remain hopeful.

- Wang Libo

Click through to watch the entire film, embedded on YouTube:

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five:

Part Six:

Part Seven:

Part Eight:

Part Nine:

Part Ten:

Part Eleven:

Part Twelve:

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1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

The 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival (June 17-27, 2010) has announced its lineup, and we’re happy to see that Du Haibin’s prize-winning documentary 1428 will be screening as part of the Festival’s International Showcase.

The festival’s program page has this to say about 1428:  “Filmmaker Du Haibin artfully hones in on the aftermath of the great Sichuan earthquake of 2008, capturing the intimate reactions of the survivors and the government’s response, both ten days after the tragedy and seven months later.”

The film will screen at the following dates and venues (to be confirmed; check the Festival website closer to the dates of the Festival).

• Sun. Jun 20, 1:45pm, Regal Cinemas #13
• Mon. Jun 21, 8:00pm, Regal Cinemas #13

Tickets will go on sale June 1 at the Festival website.

Find out more about 1428.

Relevant Classroom Use

1428 (dir. Du Haibin)

Du Haibin‘s documentary 1428 received an enthusiastic review in Variety.  Reviewer Ronnie Scheib writes:

The title of Du Haibin’s striking documentary refers to the exact time (14:28) on May 12, 2008, when a massive 8.0 earthquake rocked China’s Sichuan province. Pic proceeds with virtually no exposition, except for the words supplied by survivors as they scramble to build a makeshift existence on the ruins. Visiting a devastated village 10 days and then 210 days after the quake, Du depicts, with immediacy and casual artistry, a wide range of human reactions to the natural and political aftershocks. Fascinating, beautifully crafted Venice prizewinner fully warrants an arthouse run.

Full review can be accessed at Variety.

More details about the film here.

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1428, directed by Du Haibin, won last year’s Best Documentary Award at the Venice International Film Festival. A stunning exploration of the 8.0 earthquake that shook China’s Sichuan province in 2008, causing 70,000 deaths and 375,000 casualties, the film has an eerie resonance to the recent tragedy in Haiti.

PLEASE JOIN US AT THE FOLLOWING SCREENINGS:

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 3:30 pm

MONDAY, MARCH 1, 4:30 pm

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 St
New York, NY 10019

Click through for more information.

The Great Sichuan Earthquake took place at 14:28 on May 12, 2008. Days later, victims were reduced to salvaging destroyed pig farms in the mountains, recuperating scrap metals for the equivalent of pennies in profit, and pillaging homes. Some seven months after the earthquake, when villagers are preparing for the Lunar New Year, and promises made for all to live in houses in winter seem tough to keep, the director goes beyond the highly mediated official visits to shows us scenes not seen on official TV. New Year‘s Day starts as never-ending parade of tourists buying DVDs of the most horrific scenes, souvenir albums of corpses being pulled out of the ruins, and photo-taking in front of Beichuan, the town most severely hit, where tens of thousands of people perished in seconds.

Written and directed by DU Haibin.
Produced by Ben TSIANG. Cinematography by LI Ai’guo.

“This is independent documentary at its most sophisticated.” – Shelly Kraicer, Vancouver International Film Festival

Watch a profile of 1428 from CNN.

A dGenerate Films release

Relevant Classroom Use

National East Wind Farm, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Two themes are central to the fifteen documentaries: forgotten or suppressed history and marginal, dispossessed social groups. In the first category, Hu Jie is a pioneering documentarian, who in recent years has engaged in making video works about the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), two forbidden topics in modern Chinese history. His National East Wind Farm (Guo ying dong feng nong chang, 2008) examines the experience of hundreds of “Rightists”–former teachers, cadres, university students, and military officials who were persecuted for answering the Party’s call to voice their criticisms—incarcerated on a “thought reform through labor” farm in Mile County, Yunnan Province of southwest China. The neutral term “national farm” is official history’s euphemism for gulag. Based on interviews with former inmates and staffs of the farm, the film re-examines the absurd history from the Great Leap Forward period through the Cultural Revolution, as well as the sufferings of the bodies and souls subjugated to “remolding.”

Hu’s other work In Search for the Soul of Lin Zhao (Xun zhao Lin Zhao de ling hun, 2005) investigates an unresolved and suppressed case in modern Chinese history of thought. Lin Zhao, a student of Beijing University unique in her keen observation of social problems and courageous expression of her opinion, was persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Movement and executed in 1968. Treating her as a pioneer pursuer of civil rights and freedom of expression, the “Director’s Statement” calls for a re-examination of her legacy against the contemporary need to improve democracy and reassert human rights.

Though I Am Gone (Wo sui si qu, 2006, Hu Jie), tries to reexamine the Cultural Revolution from the sufferings of Ms. Bian Zhongyun, an ordinary high school deputy principal in Beijing who was beaten to death by her students. The film investigates into the fact that educators were the first and most heavily persecuted group during the period, but their sufferings were largely ignored by official media. Hu reveals the reason of this negligence in the “Director’s Statement”: “The huge amount of casualties among ordinary citizens would change the overall picture of the Cultural Revolution, together with the analysis of the movement’s nature, therefore leading to a deepened research on the responsibility of the Cultural Revolution.” The film is a challenge to the thin line in law and media concerning historical accounts.

Looking for the Lost Veterans of 1979 (Xun zhao 79 yue zhan xiao shi de lao bing, 2008, Zhang Dali) focuses on another ignored social group from a forgotten historical event—the veterans from the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war. As the war became out of context, the veterans found themselves deserted by the economical reform and social reconstruction in the past thirty years. From the veterans’ recounts about the glory and brutality of war and their changed experience thereafter, the film asks the question about the affect of war and social changes on common soldiers and citizens.

Many documentaries about more recent history focus on a unique phenomenon among contemporary China’s rapid and sometimes aimless changes—demolition. Artists of Yuan Ming Yuan (Yuan ming yuan de yi shu jia men, 1995, Hu Jie) and Farewell, Yuan Ming Yuan (Gao bie yuan ming yuan, 2006, Zhao Liang) are two direct records of the same event: the forced demolition of the avant-garde artist community around Yuan Ming Yuan (Old Summer Palace) in western suburb of Beijing, and the “last spring” of the artists.

Before The Flood, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Before the Flood (Yan mo, 2005, Li Yifan and Yan Yu), winner of the Wolfgang Staudte Award at the 2005 Berlin International Film Festival, can be seen as a documentary version of Jia Zhangke’s Still Life. For almost the whole year of 2002, the two filmmakers recorded how the two thousand-year-old town of Fengjie was devastated, its residents displaced, to prepare for its eventual flooding for the Three Gorges hydroelectric project on the Yangtze River. The film combines panoramic overviews and detailed observation of individual sufferings and endurance. The “Director’s Statement” calls it an allegorical work: “It focuses on individuals and objects under specific circumstances, and, through their changes and struggles, tries to open a window about this age.”

Two films focus on the 5.12 Earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, and investigate into, from different perspectives, the hidden or unseen reality behind the catastrophe. Who Killed Our Children (Hai zi hai zi, 2008, Pan Jianlin) investigates the death of hundreds of students at Muyu Village Middle School in Qingchuan county, and from this small angle examines the most shocking and heartbreaking fact about the earthquake: the high casualties of students due to the shoddy constructions of elementary, secondary, and nursery schools. As the responsibility concerning the students’ death and the accurate statistics of the causality has become a major source of unresolved conflict between the government and victims’ parents, Pan’s film is a case study of this conflict as well as a response to the problem’s call for independent report.

Red White (Zhong sheng, 2009, Chen Xinzhong), was named after a heavily devastated county, and presents local people’s material and emotional response to the catastrophe through the many mundane details of everyday life: food and shelter, conversations and quarrels, new year celebration, funerals, and religious ceremonies. At the center of the film is the activity of a Taoist master, who serves as fortuneteller, feng shui master, and source of help for many other material and emotional problems. From this unique angle, the film humanizes the survivors and ponders on human need for faith and divinity after trauma. In a review of the 2009 Beijing International Film Festival, Ying Liang, another director from Sichuan, highly praises the film for its withdrawal of moral judgment and its vivid capture of the uncanniness surrounding the landscape.

The relationship between the individual and the state machine is the explicit theme of many films about contemporary issues. Old Mom’s Pork Feet Stew (Lao ma ti hua, 2009) by controversial artist Ai Weiwei is the most recent work in the list and the filmmaker’s direct tribute to the 60^th anniversary celebration. This 75-minute documentary, shot with a hidden DV camera, records the bitter and absurd experience of Ai and other human rights activists of being harassed and illegally detained by the police of Chengdu (capital of the Sichuan province) and their later frustrating struggle with the authorities.

Petition, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Petition (Shang fang, 2009, Zhao Liang) presents a broader and “stranger than fiction” view of ordinary citizens’ struggle for judicial justice. Its protagonists—the people appealing to the high authorities in Beijing for their wrongs unresolved through local channels—are victims of and fighters against the defects of China’s legal and governmental system (according to the sociologist Yu Jianrong). Zhao’s film followed and recorded the struggles and sufferings of the “petitioners” on the margin of Beijing for an amazing 12 years, from 1996 to 2008. Divided into three chapters—”Petition Village”, “Mother and Daughter”, “Beijing Southern Railway Station”—the film combines group portraits and individual depictions. In an interview, Zhao Liang describes his working attitude as “gracious presentation.” The graciousness is especially represented in his attention to and compassion for individual lives and sufferings.

Hu Jie’s Rural Mountain (Yuan shan, 1995) is another compassionate and dignifying portrait of the dispossessed. It records the work and life of one of the most exploded group in contemporary China: the coal miners in some private and often illegal mines on the high plateau of the underdeveloped Qinghai Province. More than a protest against grave social problems—the primitive and dangerous working condition, the merciless mine owners and irresponsible local government, and the appalling poverty behind the workers’ choice, the film is an honest document about labor and life. The “Director’s Statement” expressly stated the film’s aspiration in locating the characters in human history: “[The hard labor] reflects the perseverance and dignity of the working class, and forms a segment of the history toward human civilization that we should never forget.”

Rural Mountain, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

Other films present overviews of the sixty years. 60 (2009, Zhang Ming) is part of the oral history project “They Say,” a compilation of interviews with ordinary citizens about their experience in historical and political turmoil in some forgotten historical periods. The protagonist, Wang Kang, is a contemporary to the P.R.C. His sixty years of life witnesses the growth of the republic, the various political movements, and the endless darkness and poverty. The series explores the questions about our responsibility to the often bitter, absurd, and already forgotten past, and the functions of film in the reservation and reconstruction of memory.

Ms. Hong (Hong jie, 2009, Zhang Gong) portrays the experience of the Red Guards generation. Ms. Hong was the filmmaker’s neighbor, whose turbulent life is common to ordinary citizens in a stormy society. Notably, the film is an animation. As one of the three animation shorts, together with Mist (Mi wu, Zhang Xiaotao) and Idol (Ou xiang, Chen Xuegang), to open the 2009 Beijing Independent Film Festival, it indicates a new direction for Chinese independent films.

West of the Tracks, Photo courtesy of Fanhall Films

The last film on the list, West of the Tracks (Tie xi qu, 2003, Wang Bing), is a climactic work of Chinese independent documentary filmmaking, and a master combination of panoramic view and closely-observed details. The nine-hour film is a comprehensive record of the heavy industry district in northeast China through the difficult years brought by the huge and cruel transformation of the nation from a planned to market economy. Its three chapters—”Rust”, “Remnants”, and “Rails”—focus on industrial work, youth and family life, and individual emotions respectively, and also respectively treat the social problems of bankruptcy and unemployment, demolition of old neighborhoods, and the lives on the margins of the city and of modern industry. Just like Before the Flood and Red White, the daily details recorded in the film also shockingly reveal piles of ruins. In “West of the Tracks and the New Documentary Movement in Contemporary China,” Lu Xinyu uses the image of ruins as an allegory for the loss of utopia among the huge historical and social changes in today’s China. The new documentary movement, for her, arises from and responds to the ruins. She claims, “The destiny of ‘art’ in contemporary China is to reestablish the connection between art and the people that humbly but stubbornly live on the land, to search for justification for the existence and emotion of these people.”  West of the Tracks is an artist’s response to this destiny, which is also the destiny of the more and more records of unsanctioned memories.

Relevant Classroom Use