"Are We Really So Far from the Madhouse?"

Covering the Vancouver International Film Festival for Variety, Robert Koehler has been filing rave reviews of some new Chinese independent documentaries he’s seen at the festival’s Dragons and Tigers lineup. We are excited to see his praise for Bachelor Mountain, the new film by Yu Guangyi (whose Timber Gang is distributed by dGenerate) and Are We Really So Far from the Madhouse, the latest by Li Hongqi (whose Winter Vacation is available through dGF).

Coincidentally, the same three documentaries are also reviewed enthusiastically by Kathie Smith, who covered VIFF for the website Twitch.

Click through to read excerpts from Koehler’s and Smith’s reviews – click on their names to access the full text of Koehler’s reviews on Variety (registration required) and Smith’s on Twitch. Also read the program notes on all Chinese language films at VIFF by programmer Shelly Kraicer.

Bachelor Mountain

Koehler: “Reinforcing his position as one of the world’s superior nonfiction filmmakers, Yu Guangyi completes a landmark docu trilogy with the exquisitely observed and touching “Bachelor Mountain.” Rounding out what came before with the rough-and-ready “Timber Gang” and the intense character study “Survival Song,” Yu’s look at the life and impossible love of a hardscrabble logger/laborer is his most emotionally felt work and, if fests are paying attention, should get Yu some worldwide love.”

Smith: Yu Guangyi’s Bachelor Mountain peels one more layer back from the façade built around the international notion of modern China. With a sharp eye for the punishing and perfunctory realities of life in the Changbai Mountins, Yu reveals humanity without exploitation or device. Men are beasts of burden up for hire, and the climate measures up to an unspoken endurance test of keeping warm–neither of these are opinions, but frank facts of the blunt images far from the financial centers of China’s economic dragon.

Are We Really So Far from the Madhouse?

Koehler: The epic road trip of gifted Chinese post-punk band P.K. 14 is given radical cinematic treatment in “Are We Really So Far From the Madhouse?” One of China’s most inventive rising filmmakers, Li Hongqi (“Winter Vacation”), flexes his filmmaking muscles by rethinking the music doc from the ground up. Li’s typically deadpan wit comes across here in unexpected ways, which will strike chords with progressive and music-specialty fests worldwide.

Smith: Mainland Chinese music isn’t all erhus and Teresa Teng. Likewise, Mainland film isn’t all Zhang Yimou and quasi-political dramas. Like a match made in post-rock experimental film heaven, Are We Really So Far From a Madhouse? is a collaboration between Li Hongqi (who sent me swooning last year at VIFF withWinter Vacation) and underground rock darlings P.K. 14. Pushing the boundaries of a documentary, Madhouse might as well be considered a sound and image collage within a very loose context. Li hangs out with P.K. 14 on tour in China, films them on stage, in the van and in hotels, and sets a dozen of these sequences to their songs and bizarre ambient sound. If that sounds like a glossed up tour video, think again. Li is a director who relishes mundane and monotony to the point of beautiful abstraction.

Apuda

Koehler: A devoted son’s virtually single-minded care for his slowly dying father is given similarly disciplined focus in He Yuan’s gorgeous “Apuda.” Much like Harvard-based filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Elisa Barbash, who combine a highly sophisticated approach to filmmaking with scientific analysis, He is an ethnographic researcher at the Yunnan Academy of Sciences who also happens to be a documaker of considerable artistry. Pic’s length and extreme slowness will make it a more exotic item for art-centric and docu fests, but this gem shouldn’t be overlooked.

Smith: It is hard not to think of Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas films, especially In Vanda’s Room and Colossal Youth, while silently occupying the dark, oppressive space that of Apuda calls home. He Yuan’s portraiture through the camera lens is equally as haunting and uncompromising as Costa’s. Apuda is a tough film, but not for the sake of being tough. The contrast between the living conditions depicted in the film and anyone watching the film anywhere is huge. Life, especially in the West, has been homogenized by progress and sterilized by convenience to the point that the images of a simple man with little means are shocking. He Yuan’s explicit ethnographic study has far more grand sociological implications through film and its unlimited global reach. Apuda is an astonishing documentary with micro specificity but macro scope.

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Shattered (dir. Xu Tong)

The 35th Hong Kong International Film Festival begins March 20th and runs to April 5th. We’re pleased to see that several films from directors who have films in the dGenerate catalog will be presenting new works, including some world premieres like Yu Guangyi’s Bachelor Mountain and Xu Tong’s Shattered. More information on these films, and a list of other Chinese films screening at HKIFF, after the break.

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Survival Song (dir. Yu Guangyi)

Doc Alliance, a partnership between five European film festivals, is offering free streaming of five documentaries from the Doc Alliance Selection 2009, feature film highlights from last year’s festival circuit. One of the films is Survival Song, an acclaimed documentary by Yu Guangyi, whose debut feature was the eye-opening Last Lumberjacks (coming soon from dGenerate Films). The film is available for online viewing through April 25. It can also be purchased as a downloadable .avi or DVD file.

Click through to read more about Survival Song, and access the film.

SURVIVAL SONG
/ Xiao Li Zi (orig.)

Yu Guangyi / China / 94 min

DocAllianceFilms.com offers free streaming of the FIVE documentaries from the Doc Alliance Selection 2009 right after the festival at DocAllianceFilms.com. From 21 to 25 April 5 selected titles include:
Survival Song by Yu Guangyi (China)
Auto*mate by Martin Marecek (Czech Republic)
Big John by Havard Bustnes (Norway)
Hotel Sahara by Bettina Haasen (Germany)
Maggie in Wonderland by Mark Hammarberg, Ester Martin Bergsmark, Beatrice “Maggie” Andersson

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Zhang Xianmin (photo courtesy China Independent Film Festival)

One of our key partners in China is Zhang Xianmin, who is a leading figure of the independent film scene.  Film producer, writer, programmer: these are just a few of his credentials. And now, Zhang will be contributing a series of articles for our website, offering his own perspective on Chinese indie cinema.

To kick things off, here are his thoughts on six recent Chinese independent documentaries, offering his own insights into the background on the films and filmmakers. A couple titles happen to be dGenerate titles.

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Using directed by Zhou Hao.
Zhou Hao always cross-produces several projects at the same time. When this documentary was made, he was also working on other subjects, such as the cotton industry and Olympic youths. The central character is known as Brother Long by other social outcasts. Originally from Northeast China, he makes his living by dealing drugs in Guangzhou, and eventually he is trapped in drug addiction himself. He helps others, but also requests help from others all the time, especially from the filmmaker Zhou Hao. But what Zhou Hao offers cannot save him. The story is astonishing and thrilling.

Survival Song directed by Yu Guangyi
Yu Guangyi used to be a painter for several decades. But his documentary-making is close to writing: a personal work, made step by step with integrated narrative and vivid characters. It is not until recently that Mr. Yu switched to digital filmmaking. His daughter helped him edit his first film Last Lumberjacks before she went to university. His works are deep and solid.

Empty City directed by Ji Dan
Ji Dan is not an ethnic Han Chinese. She lived in Beijing for almost ten years and developed a close relationship with Feng Yan, Li Ying and Fujioka Asako. After she returned to China, she became good friends with Sha Qing and other documentary makers and made several documentaries about marginalized people in China, such as the Japanese who stayed in China after the Second World War, old people, Tibetans. Her works includes long-term documenting, as well as chance encounters. This film is based on her long-term observation on different people in a nursing center for the elderly and the film focuses on one single character she selected among them.

Utopia directed by Wang Yiren
Wang Yiren is a newspaper journalist. He writes social news, as well as prose. This documentary is based on the phenomenon in mainland China that “special” patients are separated from others in the medical system. In the south and northwest, it mainly concerns people who were infected with smallpox thirty or forty years ago; whereas in Wang Yiren’s hometown, disabled people, (especially those with mental disabilities) are kept in a desolate area in the countryside. But this work is not about suffering; on the contrary, these people formed a community where they complement and help each other in the past years. There’s no other word but utopia that can describe this weird, warm, small community that lacks a future. This film reflects the grotesque trend beyond realism in that has emerged in Chinese documentaries over the past two or three years.

Bing Ai directed by Feng Yan
Feng Yan spent years following a peasant woman, Bing Ai, who refused to give up her own land in the Three Gorges area. Feng Yan was greatly moved by her uncompromising personality. Feng says, most Chinese people give up their own land too easily. It’s too futile. Meanwhile, the ongoing effort Feng Yan put in this documentary is comparable to Bing Ai’s persistence of the land. In this sense, the filmmaker and her subject are unified in this documentary: Bing Ai is a counterpart of Feng Yan; Feng Yan is a reflection of Bing Ai.

Crime and Punishment directed by Zhao Liang
Zhao Liang documents the routine work of a small police station in Northeast China (on the border between China and North Korea). He is a local there, but has lived in Beijing as a conceptual and visual artist for many years. The everyday scenes of work and violence themselves do not provoke spiritual thoughts, as the title indicates. But the omission and extension of certain narratives, the philosophical discussion of different possibilities in human relation are all important issues that face contemporary documentary making.

The forms of these six documentaries are all different from each other. Besides their fundamental realism, some of them question the practical function of documentary; some establish a new relationship between the filmmaker and the subject; some make the most realistic everyday life appear absurd and abstract through skillful editing. They honestly represent the diverse reality in contemporary China, and they are also the pioneers of documentary innovation.

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