This review originally appeared in Screening China.

Prisoners in Wang Bing’s The Ditch.

Bedraggled men sit in a seemingly empty desert landscape, the bareness of their surrounds strangely beautiful on screen. We see the group from a distance, as if the desert itself is a brooding presence observing these puny beings on its surface. The men are allocated numbers and descend into caves dug into the desert floor, where earthen “beds” carved out of the wall await them. Welcome to the world of Wang Bing’s The Ditch, surely one of the most stark depictions of the deprivations of the Maoist era ever committed to celluloid.

Many Chinese features since the 1980s have touched on the suffering inflicted by Mao’s endless mass political campaigns, but few have been so brutally raw in their depiction of the era’s cruelties. The Ditch plays out on the edge of the Gobi desert in China’s northwestern province of Gansu, where thousands were exiled after taking up Mao’s invitation to speak out about societal problems during the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957. The wave of criticism spooked the regime – or perhaps as some claim the entire setup was designed to lure out dissenters. In any case, the Anti-Rightist Campaign followed hot on the heels of the Hundred Flowers movement and saw many of those who had spoken out imprisoned or otherwise persecuted. As some of the characters in The Ditch recall, many suffered for ‘crimes’ such as pointing out incidents of corruption or suggesting the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” should be widened to become a “Dictatorship of the People.”

A desperate prisoner scrounges for sustenance in Wang Bing’s The Ditch.

After their arrival in the desert, the prisoners of the The Ditch are forced to endure pointless labour, digging an endless trench and ‘cultivating’ the arid soil of their surrounds. Carts do the rounds every morning collecting the night’s corpses as old men literally drop dead from overexertion. Some of those left living receive letters from home informing them that their wives have divorced them in order to escape association with “bad” political elements.

After a time all work ceases as Mao’s botched “Great Leap Forward” sees famine sweep across the country and the camp’s meagre food supply dwindles to almost nothing. Men are reduced the level of animals, eating plants they know will poison them, or in some cases gnawing on the corpses of fellow inmates.

The most heartbreaking sequence sees the dull monotony of starvation disturbed by the arrival of an inmate’s wife, who has travelled for days to bring her husband supplies. But by the time she arrives her husband has already expired. A fellow prisoner is reluctant to reveal the location of the body because, he tells fellow prisoners, he knows the remains have already been cannibalized. Meanwhile the camp administrator berates the distraught wife for wanting to see her “reactionary” husband. “You should move on,” he tells her brusquely.

These scenes are all the more disturbing for the veracity claimed by director Wang Bing. “Everything in the film really happened at the camp,” Wang was quoted as saying following the film’s debut at the Venice Film Festival last year. “Nothing has been made up or added.” The story is based on the director’s interviews with elderly survivors of the Jiabiangou and Mingshui labour camps, as well as the novel Goodbye, Jiabiangou by Yang Xianhui.

Given The Ditch‘s realist tone, it’s not surprising Wang Bing has emerged from China’s independent documentary sector. His first film in 2003 was the epic nine-hour epic West of the Tracks, which traced the closure and decay of one of the China’s mammoth socialist industrial complexes in far northeast. The Ditch is Wang’s first dramatic feature, and reveals the director to be an artful stylist, framing his bleak tale in long shots in which the men are only vaguely differentiated from each other as the indignities of prison camp life take their toll and their individuality is dissolved by hardship and hunger. They are dwarfed and ironically imprisoned by their stunning, wide open desert surrounds, adrift in a world utterly divorced from the urban environments they have come from. The camera shadows them moving through the treeless environment in tracking shots evoking the ghostly presence of the dead littering the landscape. Every frame of this movie feels haunted – by hunger, death, and the knowledge that the Chinese authorities have attempted to erase this history from the nation’s consciousness.

Eventually the handful of survivors of this nightmare are released by the Bureau for Re-education to make way for a new batch of prisoners. The camp director asks one inmate to stay on, offering him privileges in return for help dealing with influx of new men. “You’ll be better off than those released,” the director tells him. “After the famine, they’ll still be Rightists.” The comment hangs like a portent of the Cultural Revolution that was to engulf China a few years later, subjecting  “Rightists” to a new bout of murderous persecution at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards.

Like other recent films dealing with the Maoist era, such as Hu Jie’s In Search of Lin Zhao’s Soul and Though I Am Gone, it seems unlikely authorities will tolerate screenings of The Ditch on the Chinese mainland, even at ‘unofficial’ festivals and events. I was fortunate to see the film at this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival, the one place in China where such controversial works can be openly screened. Meanwhile, back on the mainland cinemas are gearing up to unleash the Communist Party’s latest love letter to itself, the sequel to 2009′s Founding of a Republic, imaginatively entitled Founding of the Party. But until films like the The Ditch and Lin Zhao can openly screen in their country of origin, the ghosts that play at the edges of these tales will continue to haunt the nation’s consciousness – and no amount of historical revisionism will dispel them.

Relevant Classroom Use

Meishi Street (dir. Ou Ning)

By Sara Beretta

Everyone, in a sense, is an artist, in that we all strive to better express ourselves. As bricoleurs, we all do our best to depict our thought, wishes and fears, making use of the media we were given (voice, gestures and action, broadly speaking) and employing techno media, in the big and blurry cloud of creativity, communication and experimentation. People mix sounds, images and what else occurs in order to be better heard and understood or, on the contrary, to conceive meanings in different and alternative, sometimes obscure and imaginative, ways.

It’s not that surprising, then, that boundaries are blurring in art, as more creatives are exploring liminal areas and practices to narrate themselves and the world they live in. This is true for contemporary Chinese artists and filmmakers, mixing practices and channels to convey their ideas. Renowned examples include artist Ai Weiwei’s work in documentaries, Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s projects in video art and films (including dGenerate’s titles Meishi Street and San Yuan Li, as well as the productions Renminbi City and Vitamin Creative Space), multimedia works by Yang Fudong, and Song Tao’s Birds Heads. In a recent article in Red Box Review, curator Samantha Culp expresses her wishes for the outcome of this mixing, specifically in how it might help sustain China’s independent film scene:

Hopefully China’s independent filmmakers can appropriate some strategies from their art-world counterparts about creating a sustainable practice through commerce, and artists can start playing with the intriguing funding, distribution and presentation possibilities opened up by crowd-sourced fundraising, quasi-curatorial festival programming, and online dissemination of works.

All of this is presented to describe a sort of ethnographic turn happening in Chinese art, especially in video and visual production, which these days often mixes up fiction and documentary practice, as if we had to transcend into the imaginary to narrate the real, to understand and deepen it. These artists occupy a unique realm that occasionally intersects with the commercial success of mainstream Chinese cinema and globally acclaimed contemporary art. Independent filmmakers may show their films in the art world, while works of artists are screened in film festivals and. We can even see a dancer documenting himself in a long experimental work (Li Ning’s Tape), rising debates and discussions after screening. In this new panorama, there are a few developing points to look at, and that my own research is focusing on. Just to mention a few: artists’ creative engagement in telling life and, maybe even more significantly, audience’s response to new art forms and showcases, actively participating different selling and distribution channels, hybridized contexts, including the web and social networks, that give chance to non-specialist to get in, appreciate and discuss. In China there’s a growing public sphere of art, that’s opening to (self)representations.

Relevant Classroom Use

The Ditch (dir. Wang Bing)

The 67th Venice Film Festival concluded last weekend; this year’s edition was not without the venue’s characteristically strong showing of Chinese titles. There were new films by action movie helmers Tsui Hark, Andrew Lau, and John Woo (who received the festival’s lifetime achievement award). Documentary filmmaker Huang Wenhai, who won an award two years ago in Venice for his film We, had two features screening this year. And Zhang Yuan, one of China’s first independent filmmakers from the vaunted 6th Generation, showed up with a state-approved 3-D animated feature(!) But the Chinese title that arguably made the biggest stir was The Ditch, the first narrative feature directed by Wang Bing.

Wang made a name for himself with his documentaries, most notably the nine hour epic West of the Tracks. The Ditch was a twelfth-hour surprise addition to the Venice competition lineup. Gina Doggett of AFP describes the film: “Set in 1960, the film chronicles the conditions facing inmates accused of being right-wing dissidents opposed to China’s great socialist experiment, condemned to digging a ditch hundreds of miles long in the dead of winter.”

Nigel Andrews raves in the Financial Times:

Wang Bing’s onslaught on Chinese communism, in the years between Mao’s “Hundred Flowers” and the cultural revolution, is the most honourable film to emerge from the People’s Republic in recent memory. Needless to say, it was made in secret. Wang, a noted documentarist, awaits the government’s response to having made the movie and then bringing it to Venice.

Justin Chang adds his enthusiasm in his review for Variety:

Drawn from a novel by Yang Xianhui and interviews Wang conducted with survivors (one of whom, Li Xiangnian, is credited with a “special appearance” as one of the prisoners), the film has an overpowering feel of unfiltered reality that persists even as tightly framed dramatic moments begin to emerge. Admirers of Wang’s documentaries know his ability to capture real moments of extraordinary intimacy, and the sense of verisimilitude here is so strong that those walking in unawares may at first think they’re watching another piece of highly observant reportage — never mind that no filmmaker would ever have been granted access, just as no humane documentarian could have kept the camera rolling without offering his subjects a scrap of food at the very least.

Wang gives insights to his motivations for making the film at a Venice press conference. As reported by AFP:

“We wanted to preserve the memories, be aware of the memories, even painful ones,” he told a news conference.

As Wang was born in 1967, the events “took place before my birth, so I put in great effort to understand the 1950s and 1960s in China, to understand the historical truth.

“Past facts are criticisable because the Chinese people suffered, but I think it is important to show these events on the screen… to show how past history has for better or worse directed our course,” Wang said.

Here are some additional links to information on the film, in Chinese:

http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2010-09-08/13163080214.shtml

http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2010-09-08/13163080214.shtml

http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2010-09-10/23463083493.shtml

http://news.china.com.cn/rollnews/2010-09/10/content_4232053.htm

http://www.dfdaily.com/html/171/2010/9/8/516352.shtml

http://ent.sina.com.cn/r/m/2010-09-06/18153078135.shtml

On a related note, dGenerate is proud to announce that it has recently secured a distribution deal with one of China’s pre-eminent documnentary filmmakers, whose shattering works probe the untold stories of China’s Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. More details to come…

Relevant Classroom Use

Wee Ling Soh

Soh ponders:

While we get the bleak overtone, we see the perfectly attractive models and we’re amused by its accompanying surrealist art references [e.g. Magritte's Golconda], we wonder – if a film looks better when it is paused (flawlessly-executed visuals in almost every frame), is something seriously wrong? Perhaps models just are not actors and it’s best if they stuck with their actual jobs: Modeling.

Is this the future of independent filmmaking in China?

Independent filmmakers in China make their films on shoestring budgets, scraping together whatever funds they have in pursuit of a story they feel absolutely compelled to tell.  Meanwhile, some would say that the Chinese avant garde art and video scene – not to be confused with the indie filmmaking scene – is pretty much a playground for commercial interests. It’s a subculture flush with the money and attention of high culture trendseekers and investment speculators, with artists commanding large sums for elaborate gallery installations or videos running hours on end.

One can look to Wang Bing as the symbolic fork in the road. His West of the Tracks is a landmark work that has influenced a wave of grungy, street-level observational documentary, one of the reigning hallmarks of contemporary do-it-yourself Chinese indie filmmaking. But this inspirational landmark of the indie doc scene was funded in no small part from European arts and culture sources, and it’s a work whose massive length (9 hours) forebears a conventional theatrical screening, making more sense as a series of gallery installations playing on an endless loop. Indeed, Wang’s subsequent work, like his 14 hour Crude Oil, seems increasingly tailored to a gallery setting, which is unsurprising as the funding for his work comes largely from the art world.

If the art scene is where the money is, I don’t begrudge Wang Bing or other independent filmmakers for following the money, if that’s what will sustain their work.  One of the most celebrated films in our catalog is Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s San Yuan Li, a film commissioned by the Venice Biennale and an example of how funding from the art world makes amazing, artistically innovative work possible. But looking at Yang Fudong’s video, you have to wonder how commercial interests will influence our understanding of what’s avant garde or independent:

Relevant Classroom Use

Oxhide 2 (dir. Liu Jiayin)

On Wednesday, dGenerate Films will publish the results of its poll of Chinese filmmakers and experts on the top Chinese language films of the past decade. While the poll includes all Chinese language films, we’d like to take a moment to focus on films from Mainland China. Here are Shelly Kraicer’s top ten Mainland Chinese films of the 2000s, with some observations on key developments in the field over the past ten years. Shelly will give a slightly different list that includes all Chinese-language cinema for the official poll.

—–

The editors of the dGenerate Films blog have asked me to come up with a list of the ten best Chinese films of the decade (2000-2009). I’ve thought about this for several days, and would prefer to call these the ten films from China that I consider to be the most important from the last ten years. This shifts the emphasis from “best”, from some difficult-do-objectify criterion of excellence to one of significance. Equally non-objective, to be sure, but I feel more comfortable with significance as a subjective criterion. This is for several reasons: one in particular is that “best” seems at least to imply a criterion of professional polish, of mastery, that I would not want to over-value while surveying recent Chinese film.

In fact, the key trend, if I can call it that, of the last decade of Chinese filmmaking seems to be precisely its de-professionalization. Filmmaking has moved beyond the academy, the Beijing Film Academy to be exact, responsible for so many filmmakers superbly trained in their crafts, and towards something much more broadly based and open, dominated by amateur digital filmmaking. These young, often self-trained filmmakers aren’t necessarily making the most well-crafted films out there, but their experiments are often among the most important things happening in cinema in this part of the world.

Rather than ranking films (which is sort of silly: what makes #6 better than #7?), I’d like to group my choices into three larger sets, as follows:

Three masterpieces:

Platform (Zhantai), Jia Zhangke, 2001
Jia’s masterpiece, so far: beautiful moving, profound: the closest cinema in the PRC has come yet to its own grand generational narrative

West of Tracks (Tiexi qu), Wang Bing, 2002
A film that changed the way we see China: a cinema monument that defines the close of an era

Oxhide 2 (Niupi 2), Liu Jiayin, 2009
A structuralist experiment with a narrative core: and Liu makes these two apparent opposites seem simply to be the same: funny and profound.

Seven more that stand out:

Suzhou River (Suzhou he), Lou Ye, 2000
Lou’s most accomplished poetic fusion of style and content

Looking for Lin Zhao’s Soul (Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun), Hu Jie, 2005
Morally devastating, emotionally eviscerating, a testament to the courage of both its subject and its director

Still Life (Sanxia haoren), Jia Zhangke, 2006
Jia’s formal control contains fabulist touches and a staggeringly comprehensive intellectual apparatus

The Sun Also Rises (Taiyang zhaochang shengqi), Jiang Wen, 2007
Mysteriously beautiful, masterful even in its confusion (or is it ours, facing something so new we don’t yet know how to read it?)

Jalainur (Zhalainuo’er), Zhao Ye, 2008
China’s youngest poet of cinema: light, shadow, colour, steam and snow.

The Search (Xunzhao Zhimei Gengdeng), Wanma Caidan, 2009
So understated is this fable of making cinema (and love) that its sorrow and rage speak softly, all the more powerfully

Petition (Shangfang), Zhao Liang, 2009
China’s other great long form new documentary, with a political daring and commitment to the real that, at the limit, transmutes reality into something shocking (the 316 minute long version)

Other films of great significance this decade:

Orphan of Anyang (Anyang ying’er), Wang Chao, 2001
Seafood (Haixian), Zhu Wen (2001)
Fish and Elephant (Jinnian xiatian), Li Yu, 2001
Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (Zhulin qi xian), Yang Fudong, 2003
Tang Poetry (Tangshi), Zhang Lu, 2004
South of the Clouds (Yunde nanfang), Zhu Wen, 2004
A World Without Thieves (Tianxia wuzei), Feng Xiaogang, 2004
Oxhide (Niupi), Liu Jiayin, 2005
Thirteen Princess Trees (Shisan ke paotong), Lu Yue, 2006
Yasukuni (Jingguo shenshe), Li Ying, 2007
The Other Half (Ling yiban), Ying Liang, 2007
Little Moth (Xue chan), Peng Tao, 2007
Survival Song (Xiao Lizi), Yu Guangyi, 2008
24 City (24 chengji), Jia Zhangke, 2008
Perfect Life (Wanmei shenghuo), Emily Tang, 2008
Sun Spots (Guang ban), Yang Heng, 2009

Relevant Classroom Use

Richard Brody (Photo courtesy of The New Yorker)

Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. Since 2005, he has been the movie-listings editor at the magazine; he writes film reviews, a column about DVDs, and a blog about movies, The Front Row. He is the author of the book “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.”

In this interview, dGenerate Films’ Kevin Lee talks to Richard Brody about his top ten films of the 2000s, in which he lists three Chinese feature films: Jia Zhangke’s The World, Wang Bing’s Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, and Ying Liang’s The Other Half. This conversation touches on all three films, and why Brody considers Chinese cinema to be “the crucial story in cinema of the past decade.” Brody also discusses two other films on his list, Jean-Luc Godard’s In Praise of Love and Claude Lanzmann’s Sobibor, 14 October 1943, 4PM, and their connection to the Chinese films he selected.

Brody’s full top ten list, and a topical index of the podcast with timecode follows after the break.

Play the Podcast (Time: 22:39) (right click to download)

Download audio file (Richard-Brody_mixdown.mp3)

Richard Brody’s top ten films of the 2000s (as found on The New Yorker’s The Front Row blog):

1. Eloge de l’amour (“In Praise of Love”) (2001, Jean-Luc Godard)
2. The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Wes Anderson)
3. The World (2005, Jia Zhangke)
4. A Talking Picture (2003, Manoel de Oliveira)
5. Regular Lovers (2005, Philippe Garrel)
6. Sobibor, Oct. 14, 1943, 4 P.M. (2001, Claude Lanzmann)
7. Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2009, Wang Bing)
8. Knocked Up (2008, Judd Apatow)
9. Mooladé (2004, Ousmane Sembene)
10. The Other Half (2007, Ying Liang)

Podcast Topic Index:

0:00 – “The crucial story in cinema of the past decade.”
4:15 – The Other Half by Ying Liang: “One of the decade’s two best new filmmakers.”
8:00 – Fengming: A Chinese Memoir by Wang Bing: “The decade’s best new non-fiction filmmaker.”
12:10 – “The two poles of documentary filmmaking.”
15:08 – The World by Jia Zhangke: “The best new non-American filmmaker of the last 20 years.”
19:10 – Jean-Luc Godard’s In Praise of Love and its resonance with contemporary Chinese cinema.

Relevant Classroom Use

Crude Oil (Photo courtesy of Light Industry)

Triple Canopy and Light Industry present the East Coast premiere of Wang Bing’s Crude Oil, a fourteen-hour film installation tracking a fourteen-hour workday of crude-oil extraction in northwest China, from Wednesday, November 4 to Sunday, November 8. The film will be viewed from 9am until 11pm each day, running five times in its entirety.

Accompanying Crude Oil in an adjacent room will be a film program by Matthew Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Lucy Raven (7:30pm, Wednesday, November 4) as well as screenings of Wang Bing’s Coal Money (4pm, Saturday, November 7) and West of the Tracks (12pm, Sunday, November 8). A curated DVD library of related films will be available for viewing throughout the week.

The central theme of the program, as stated in a note from Triple Canopy, is “work, workers, workplaces, and the landscapes of labor,” which provide a dwelling place for art in today’s world of “sheer speed, placelessness, and impersonality of global finance.”

The screenings will be held at Industrial City, 220 36th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), 5th Floor, Brooklyn, New York. More details can be found here. Descriptions of Wang Bing’s films follow.

Crude Oil (Yuan You)
Wang Bing, 2008, video, 14 hours
Wednesday, November 4–Sunday, November 8, 9 am–11 pm, daily

The terrain that plays the leading role in the film is in the province of Qinghai, a similar landscape to that of the neighboring province of Tibet. A high, empty, rough, windy, and desolate landscape. A meditation on labor, art, and time, the film is meant to be seen in its entirety, where, to quote the note  from Triple Canopy, “Art-time and work-time coincide, and the film’s workers, in breakrooms and on oil fields, enter our space as equals.”

“The question of whether Crude Oil by Wang Bing is an installation or a film screening is basically trivial. It is an important and grand work and the label is not that relevant. What is relevant is how an exhausting work like this can best be presented. And how can it live on.” — International Film Festival Rotterdam

Coal Money (Tong Dao)
Wang Bing, 2008, video, 52 mins
Saturday, November 7 at 4pm

On the coal road linking the Shanxi mines with the large port of Tianjin, in northern China, the drivers of 100-ton trucks shuttle endlessly to and from, day and night. On the roadside: prostitutes, cops, petty racketeers, garage owners, mechanics.

U.S. premiere of Wang Bing’s most recent documentary, which follows Chinese coal truckers from the mine to the market, as coal transforms into money. Screening followed by discussion with Rebecca Karl (Associate Professor, History and East Asian Studies, NYU) and Zhang Zhen (Associate Professor, Cinema Studies, NYU).

West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu)
Wang Bing, 2003, video, 554 mins
Part 1, Rust, 244 mins
Part 2, Remnants, 178 mins
Part 3, Rails, 132 mins
Sunday, November 8 at 12pm

Wang Bing’s debut, filmed between 1999 and 2001, in Shenyang, northeast China. The nine-hour film is a comprehensive record of the heavy industry district in the city, 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.

“Without question the greatest work to have come out of the Chinese documentary movement, and must be ranked among the most extraordinary achievements of world cinema in the new century.” — Lu Xinyu, New Left Review

“Wang Bing’s overwhelming West of the Tracks presents us with the panoramic spectacle of progress collapsing. . . . It is every twentieth-century mural depiction of the struggle for the good life—socialist or capitalist—viewed in reverse. It is as if the film were being run backwards, or like the last lines of Rilke’s Duino Elegies: ‘And we, who think of happiness ascending, / would with consternation / know the rapture that almost overwhelms us, / when happiness fails.’” — Luc Sante

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.

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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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My first trip to Beijing was a startling revelation.  The city seemed to me a mix of Las Vegas and Eastern European Communist aesthetics.  The smog, traffic, and sprawl of Beijing were mind-boggling (and I’m an LA native).  The underground, independent film community, though, was small and, as I soon found out, very inviting.  A few introductions from colleagues in the States got me meetings with key influencers, including professor/producer/actor Zhang Xianmin, critic/curator/filmmaker Zhang Yaxuan, and programmer/critic Shelly Kraicer.  I knew I found the beating heart of the community when I walked into an Communist Bloc-era apartment, in the middle of a Friday night, saw leading filmmaker Wang Bing chain-smoking in the corner, and sat down for a serious discussion about the politics of world cinema.

That first trip solidified for me the importance of distributing these films to an American audience.  Not only could we return revenue to filmmakers, so they could keep making films, but we had an opportunity to open a window onto contemporary China.  There is no easy access in the States to contemporary media made about China, from within China, by Chinese filmmakers.  The opportunity and need were, and still is, clearly present.

When I returned to the States, we quickly got to work on watching films and pulling the company together, which took a good year of hard work, including a second visit to China in Fall 2008 (see Digital Underground in the People’s Republic).  But to this day, I remain eternally grateful to the filmmakers, professors, programmers and critics who welcomed me with open arms on that first trip to Beijing.  Without their faith in our work, and the trust of the filmmakers, we wouldn’t be granted the access that truly sets dGenerate apart.

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