Zhao Dayong, director of Street Life and Ghost Town

By Isabella Tianzi Cai

This entry is part of a weeklong spotlight of newly available titles in the dGenerate Films catalog.

In the Global Times, Chris Hawke (Hao Ying) highlights director Zhao Dayong’s filmmaking career and three of his documentaries.  The article is occasioned by the screening of Zhao’s Street Life (2006) and Ghost Town (2008) at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

Street Life and Ghost Town, both available through the dGenerate catalog, have received international recognition in the festival circuit, and continue to garner praise from film critics from around the world. With regard to Street Life,  Hawke writes,

Zhao explores how the poorest of the poor prey on each other, and draws parallels and allusions to the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.

This point is reaffirmed by Zhao: “As you can see through the plot and the ending, Street Life does indeed work as a parable, more or less.” In terms of shooting technique, Hawke points out Zhao’s unintrusive approach. In order to capture the last scene in Street Life, Zhao said that he followed his subject for hours despite feeling the power to intervene. Because he is willing to take chances and let the stories unfold on their own, he has successfully

[captured] some shockingly intimate scenes [in Ghost Town], such as an impoverished father suggesting to his daughter and her boyfriend that they break up so the father can sell her as a wife to a rich out-of-towner.

Not many details are given about Zhao’s latest documentary, My Father’s House. But we know it is “the story of an underground Nigerian church.” Zhao expressed that he loves changes and enjoyed working with new subjects; given that he is concerned with contemporary social realities in China, it is not surprising that he has found a new inspiration in “Guangzhou’s swelling African population.”

As for Zhao’s formalistic choices, Hao thinks that

Zhao’s documentaries, like those of many other Chinese directors, are slow moving, capturing the epic nature of daily life and transporting the viewer completely into a new, foreign environment.

However, Zhao prefers not to think of the pace of his films as either fast or slow. He wants to leave audience room for interpretation and also protect his creative space. He considers the freedom and authority that he has over his work extremely valuable. Therefore, he does not believe in film schools, which he thinks of as “a crushing environment for the independent spirit.”

Relevant Classroom Use

This entry is part of a weeklong spotlight of newly available titles in the dGenerate Films catalog.

Director Zhao Dayong opens his documentary Street Life with Big Fatty, a physically imposing but cheerful homeless man who collects recyclable litter during the day and turns into a “street slam poet” at night. He sits in the middle of Shanghai’s Nanjing Road, a luxury shopping district whose daytime crowds give way to “invisible” people lurking on the streets at night. A sort of Chinese homeless griot, Big Fatty sings from the popular masterpiece Journey to the West (Wu Cheng’en, 16th century): “Oh the great Monkey King! There is no hurry, monkey. The Celestial Emperor has asked you to look after his horses… But the Monkey King didn’t kneel down. He didn’t understand the rules of Heaven.” Big Fatty’s  Impromptu recitation of classic Chinese literature constrasts starkly against Nanjing Road’s night landscape of neon signs  and Western luxury shops and restaurants.

Since 1845, Nanjing Road (formerly Park Lane or Main Road) has been a bustling commercial artery of Shanghai, rich in history (a tragic accident occurred here in 1937 during the war with Japan) and commerce. Today Nanjing Road is still the main shopping street in Shanghai, alluring people with its copious malls and electronic billboards, the symbol of development and economic success attracting migrants from all over the country. Zhao Dayong traces a vivid and somewhat ghastly fresco reflecting another side of Nanjing Road, a brutal, raw, and real tale about migrants living and surviving on the street.

With his DV camera, Zhao follows the work routine of several migrants, specifically focusing on the daily misfortunes of Black Skin (Hei Pi). Black Skin is a young, strong and naïve guy who works hard collecting plastic bottles, paper, and other recyclable litter, which he sells to the “entrepreneur” Fatty Lee. He spends his days in the alleys of Nanjing Road, sweating during the day and hanging out with other migrant workers. Another memorable character is Hubei (his nickname for the province in China from which he hails): petty thief, alcohol lover and experienced with jail after stealing Benz hood ornaments from parked cars to resell them. Black Skin occasionally partners with  the cripple Ah Qiao, who proves to be as greedy as he is fond of gambling: after their hard teamwork, Ah Qiao disappears with their money. We also meet Anhui (also named for his home province), a young entrepreneurial fellow who teases Black Skin for his belief and hope in living on litter collecting. It’s a hard life on the road, no place for children, yet we are faced with a stray boy, abandoned by his mother and neglected by his father, now pushed prematurely into adulthood. He speaks and acts like an experienced man, but breaks into tears when asked about his mother.

There are many real-life characters surrounding Black Skin’s life; it’s a sort of self-organized sub-society, a network of mutual support and reciprocal exploitation. The territory is not that big and the money is not that much, yet “There’s competition everywhere”, as one of them points out. Everyone must work faster and smarter, collecting rubbish on the street and from those collected by others, a truly desperate form of robbery.

These beggars and litter-collectors exist as invisible and forgotten shadows of Shanghai, moving in a sort of parallel reality but strictly linked to the same boom that excites the city. It is just the other side of the capitalist coin, the extreme poverty of the periphery juxtaosed with the growing wealth of the center, adopting the same capitalist strategies for surviving in a dramatic, grotesque fashion. As commercial wealth flows through Nanjing Road, the migrants try to catch it in desperate manners.  An overcrowded night celebration for China’s National Day is an occasion for collecting heaps of litter and picking pockets. Even in the frenetic puzzle of images director Zhao offers us, there are some still moments that are quite dramatic: the tired, tragic and somehow epic walk of old beggars and a blind man in the narrow street singing a love song that virtually brings the entire street to a standstill.

This frenetic world proves too complicated and stressful for the naïve Black Skin: he gets drunk, fights the police and is imprisoned twice. When he emerges from jail he looks mentally disturbed,  no longer the active and bustling man we met in the beginning. He is a rootless body with no identity, wondering around the city screaming, singing and dancing, frantically and breathlessly touching the space around him, discarded in what was once the city of his dreams.

Zhao Dayong

Zhao’s investment of time and attention among the migrants is remarkable, allowing the audience to feeling their stress but also a strange sense of freedom of life on the street; hope mises with desperation, even when everything seems to oppose the fantasy of a better reality. Images and dialogues are vividly captured in the moment. The strenuous effort of living is evident from Black Skin’s nervous twitch; the pain is piercing when the camera fixes on the dragging feet of the old epic beggar; an irrational glee is contagious in Big Fatty’s improvised songs and invented histories.

Much as Zhao would do with a peripheral rural landscape in his masterpiece Ghost Town (2008), Street Life exposes forgotten and hidden urban ghosts with direct and abrupt images. Zhao films daily life as it reveals itself to his eye, without judgment. His glance is genuine and participatory, recording the micro-narratives of people pouring from the countryside towards the promise of Shanghai’s Pearl Tower and the Bund, looking for the opportunity to take part in a new society that apparently doesn’t have place for them. While the madly desperate Black Skin’s sings: “Tomorrow will be a brighter day…Tomorrow will be a brighter day…” a large video screen in the square broadcasts the Monkey King from the Journey to the West, brings us back to the opening: “Curse you, Monkey! You’ve crossed me! Now you must pay!” Unlike the Monkey King, many of Shanghai’s migrants have paid a terrible price for their journey.

Sara Beretta is an anthropologist and PhD student at Milan University, researching Chinese independent cinema and visual production.

Relevant Classroom Use

Fortune Teller (dir. Xu Tong)

This year’s 40th edition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival has a particularly strong showing of Chinese films. Though none are competing for the prestigious Tiger award, there are plenty in the Bright Future section of emerging filmmakers, as well as a couple of programs specifically about China. But we are especially pleased to announced that two titles we distribute in North America will make their European premiere at Rotterdam. dGenerate’s Kevin B. Lee will be attending the festival; if you happen to be there and would like to meet Kevin or attend a screening, he can be reached at kevin *at* dgeneratefilms *dot* com.

Our films are:

Fortune Teller, dir. Xu Tong

Li Baicheng is a charismatic fortune teller who services a clientele of prostitutes and marginalized figures whose jobs, like his, are commonplace but technically illegal in China. He practices his ancient craft in a village near Beijing while taking care of his deaf and dumb wife Pearl, whom he had rescued from her family’s mistreatment. Winter brings a police crackdown on both fortune tellers and prostitutes, forcing Li and Pearl into temporary exile in his hometown, where he revisits old family demons. His humble story is told with chapter headings similar to Qing Dynasty popular fiction, as the film draws narrative complexity from China’s everyday life.

Cinerama 7 Tue 01 Feb 10:30
Cinerama 5 Fri 04 Feb 12:45

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Tape, dir. Li Ning

For five grueling years, Li Ning documents his struggle to achieve success as an avant-garde artist while contending with the pressures of modern life in China. He is caught between two families: his wife, son and mother, whom he can barely support; and his enthusiastic but disorganized guerilla dance troupe.  Li’s chaotic life becomes inseparable from the act of taping it, as if his experiences can only make sense on screen. Tape shatters documentary conventions, utilizing a variety of approaches, including guerilla documentary, experimental street video, even CGI.  Much like Jia Zhangke’s Platform, Tape captures a decade’s worth of artistic aspirations and failures, while breaking new ground in individual expression in China.

LV 6 Wed 02 Feb 12:00 tickets
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In addition. Zhao Dayong (Ghost Town, Street Life) will screen his new documentary My Father’s House, as part of the Festival’s special Raiding Africa program. Inspired by the growing influence of China in some African countries, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) asks seven filmmakers from South Africa, Cameroon, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo and Angola to make films in China. The African directors’ films will premiere, along with a contextual film program, during the Rotterdam’s 40th edition.

We hope to have more coverage of the festival in the days to come…

Relevant Classroom Use

Thomas Mao (dir. Zhu Wen)

Judging by the extensive coverage of Chinese films at the Vancouver International Film Festival, one can conclude that it is one of the key venues to see the best of Chinese cinema outside of China. We’ve already pointed to reports by VIFF Dragons and Tigers programmer Shelly Kraicer, Film Comment’s Robert Koehler and MUBI’s Daniel Kasman. In the latest issue of Senses of Cinema, Berenice Reynaud offers an in-depth take on half a dozen Chinese-language titles, among many other films reviewed from the festival. Some excerpts:

On Li Hongqi’s Winter Vacation: “Li alternates wordless, rigorously composed scenes with instances of sparse dialogue, a Beckett-like hollowing of everyday platitudes.”

On Zhu Wen’s Thomas Mao: “Another scintillating example of neo-Chinese wit.”

On Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew: “Old Shanghai is disappearing in the wake of unprecedented urban destruction (a lot of it caused by the World Expo itself); I Wish I Knew captures it as a dream, a memory, a flow of cinematic images that are as fluid and immaterial as the two rivers that run through it.”

On Hao Jie’s Single Man: “Visceral, off-colour, generous to a fault, Hao Jie’s Guanggun (Single Man) is one of the most exciting filmmaking debuts in years.”

On Zhao Dayong’s The High Life: “Zhao plays with our narrative expectations, blurring the lines between fiction and self-representation.”

On Xu Tong’s Fortune Teller: “Following Li and Little Pearl on the back alleys and dusty roads of rural China, Xu – whose first film, Mai shou (Wheat Harvest, 2008) was the controversial portrait of a lower class prostitute leading a double life – casts an unsentimental gaze at these humble lives that the “new and harmonious society” would like to keep under the rug.”

Reynaud concludes of the latter three films:

During the Mao years, conformity was the norm. Now the powers-that-be want to transform the citizens into quiet, obedient consumers. Films such as Single Man, High Life or Fortune Teller outline the gap between these grand plans and the way people live, point out the heightened contradictions of modernisation. Whether they resort to fictionalisation or experimental techniques, they manage to capture something of this reality that Lacan perceived as left over between the symbolic (the laws) and the imaginary (the utopias of socialism or free market).

Read Reynaud’s complete festival report at Senses of Cinema.

Relevant Classroom Use

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.

Relevant Classroom Use

Director Liu Jiayin answering questions at Get It Louder (photo: Get It Louder)

Get It Louder (Da Sheng Zhan), one of China’s hottest showcases for emerging creative talent, followed its first session in Beijing with a run in Shanghai. The film program was particularly intense, featuring 26 movies (9 documentaries and 17 narrative) by both Chinese and non-Chinese filmmakers. The screenings included dGenerate titles Er Dong (dir. Yang Jin), Oxhide I & II (dir. Liu Jiayin) and Street Life (dir. Zhao Dayong).

Get It Louder’s stated theme of “Sharism,” emphasizing a spirit of collaboration and exchange among audiences and artists, was especially pertinent to the independent films on display, which otherwise are largely inaccessible to audiences in China.  Director Q&A sessions were characterized not only by technical and artistic topics, but often went in depth over the the directors’ intentions. The concept of “Sharism” was demonstrated in the exchanges between viewers and directors, enriching the cinematic experience. One’s individual experiences of the film is not cancelled but amplified in exchanging perceptions with others.

The artistry and complexity of the works shone through in the screenings. The hard life of homeless migrant workers is realistically and poetically told by Zhao Dayong in Street Life. The fiction work by Yang Jin is deeply rooted in his own experience growing up in rural Shanxi province. Liu Jiayin’s exploration of time and space creatively transforms gestures and rituals we all pass through daily. Once again, art and life are not that far from each other, and sharing the experience of feeling and commenting on them is enriching and worthy. Hope there will be more and more events and occasions – in China and elsewhere – to have a look at ourselves through the eyes (and lens) of independent directors.

Relevant Classroom Use

Rumination (dir. Xu Ruotao)

The 2010 Vancouver International Film Festival (September 30 to October 15) has just concluded. This was my fourth year programming Chinese language films for VIFF’s Dragons and Tigers section for East Asian cinema; this year’s edition featured 43 features and 21 shorts, co-curated by Tony Rayns and myself. I selected 19 features and three shorts: 12 from China, 4 from Hong Kong, 3 from Taiwan, 2 from Malaysia, and one from Singapore. Details of the films from the People’s Republic of China, including comments derived from my catalogue notes for VIFF, can be found below.

Within the D&T section, the Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema, programmed by Tony Rayns, featured 8 films by young, as yet “undiscovered” directors. The jury, comprised of Jia Zhangke, Bong Joon-ho, and Denis Côté, awarded its prize to the Japanese film Good Morning World!, directed by Hirohara Satoru. Two special mentions were awarded: one to the Chinese film Rumination (Fanchu), by Xu Ruotao, and one to Phan Dang Di’s Vietnamese film Don’t Be Afraid B!

As usual, I chose more films from China than from any other territory. I try each year to balance at least two goals in my programming: I want to give VIFF audiences a sense of the increasing variety of Chinese language filmmaking, both in the independent sector, and in commercial genres. At the same time, it has always been VIFF’s policy and my own personal preference to highlight the work of independent young filmmakers working outside of the system of official censorship and distribution (independent tizhiwai films). Indie documentary filmmaking continues to be particularly strong in China, and I could only choose a few examples: it would have been easy to devote the bulk of my 9 feature length film slots to Chinese independent films this year.

DOCUMENTARIES

Karamay
(Kalamayi)
(China, 2010, 356 mins, HDCAM)
Directed By: Xu Xin
Producer: Zhu Rikun; DP and Editor: Xu Xin
Print Source: Zhu Rikun, Li Xianting’s Film Fund
Web Site: lixianting.org

On December 8th, 1994, 796 of Karamay’s brightest young students assembled with their teachers at the Xinjiang city’s Friendship Hall to perform for a visiting official delegation. During the performance, a fire broke out and 323 people were killed, mostly school children aged 6 to 14. Survivors chillingly remembered hearing instructions for the children to remain in their seats as the officials evacuated themselves first. The details of the fire and subsequent coverup were suppressed by the local officials, and even now Chinese media are prohibited from openly discussing this event.

In this vacuum, thirteen years after the event, Beijing-based independent documentary filmmaker Xu Xin undertook to film this monument to the victims of Karamay, taking as his mission to provide, through cinema, the missing memorial that the victims’ families have been demanding since 1994.

Through the use of precisely framed and shot black and white images, Xu Xin’s film, completed this year, combines a graveyard visit, a series of interviews with surviving students, teachers, and parents of the dead, along with shocking first hand video from the fire and its immediate aftermath to commemorate in gripping detail and, later, with piercing and angrily political analysis, the event in its full horror.

The film gains its astonishing power throughout its monumental length, by its patient amassing of detail, its unlimited respect for the truth articulated by the victims and their parents, and its insistence on capturing, via sound and images, an unimaginable tragedy in all its dimensions.

I Wish I Knew
(Haishang chuanqi)
(China, 2010, 138 mins, 35mm)
Directed By: Jia Zhangke
Producers: Ren Zhonglun, Chow Keung, An Gang, Li Peng ; Screenplay:  Jia Zhangke ; DP:: Yu Lik-wai ; Editor: Zhang Jia; Music: Lim Giong
Print source (Canada):
Michael Boyuk, Filmswelike
Web Site: filmswelike.com

Master director Jia Zhangke’s eloquent Shanghai elegy recreates the hustle, the drama and the music of that fabled, romantic Eastern city’s glorious history. From glamorous art deco gangsters to modern-day literary idols, interviews and cityscapes bring cosmopolitan ghosts to vivid life.

Jia interviews a series of present and former Shanghaiers about their memories of life in the metropolis during its heydays in the 1930s and 1940s, including the sons and daughters of Jazz Age moguls and gangsters, left- and right-wing politicians, and contemporary investors and writers. He pays particular attention to actors and filmmakers from Shanghai’s fabled movie industries, including the great actress Shangguan Yunzhu (her son is interviewed) and revered director Fei Mu (his daughter and his star actress Wei Wei appear). The appearance in the film of Taiwanese and Hong Kong figures like director Hou Hsiao-hsien and singer/actress Rebecca Pang illustrate how much of Shanghai’s creative spirit migrated to Taipei and Hong Kong after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Interspersed among the interviews are shots of Shanghai today, that speak tellingly, with a beauty and precision that only Jia Zhangke can capture.

According to Jia, “When I sat face-to-face with characters in my film, and listened to them talk ever so calmly about the hair-raising events in their pasts, I suddenly realized what it was that I captured with my camera: a dream of freedom twinkling in their eyes.” Jia’s film celebrates a story of a vibrantly creative metropolitan culture, made in China, whose heart, although transplanted, continues to beat with passion and glory.

See my essay on the film at the Moving Image Source.

Fortune Teller
(Suan ming)
(China, 2009, 157 mins, DVCAM)
Directed By: Xu Tong; DP & Editor: Xu Tong
Print source: Xu Tong

Xu Tong is one of the most controversial documentary filmmakers working in China today. His first film Wheat Harvest (Mai shou) depicted the family life of a young sex worker. Fortune Teller offers a deeper, richer look into the margins of Chinese society that’s both somewhat shocking and deeply revelatory.

Li Baicheng is a traditional Chinese fortune teller. He lives in a village not far from Beijing with his wife Little Pearl, a deaf and dumb woman who has the mental age of a child. Li takes gentle, patient care of her after rescuing her from her own family’s mistreatment. Li himself is a charismatic gnome of a man, stooped and tiny, with an irresistible sparkle in his eyes. His clients seem largely to be sex workers in the town, who come to him for advice on careers, loves and even when and how they should change their names to improve their luck.

When police crackdowns threaten the livelihoods of both the prostitutes and the fortune tellers – who, as unlicensed workers, occupy similar positions in the social ecology of small town Chinese traditional culture – Li Baicheng and Little Pearl are forced to move to his hometown.

Formally, the film is divided into sections with paired chapter headings, just like Qing dynasty popular fiction. Insisting on putting marginal lives at the epicentre of Chinese spiritual and physical existence, Xu Tong’s film – and filmmaking – is both breathtakingly intimate and fiercely socially committed.

FEATURES

Feature fiction films from China at VIFF this year covered the entire range, from the independent art-house fractured narratives of Rumination and The High Life and the rollicking village sex comedy Single Man; through tizhinei (i.e.passed censorship and screenable in theatres in China) experimental fiction Crossing The Mountain, art house comedy Winter Vacation, and the essentially unclassifiable Daoist action/comedy/doc Thomas Mao; all the way to the super-blockbuster Aftershock.

Rumination (dir. Xu Ruotao)

Rumination
(Fan Chu)
(China, 2009, 110 mins, DVCAM)
Directed By: Xu Ruotao
Producers: Xu Shan, Zhan Chen ; Screenplay: Xu Ruotao ; DPs: Cong Feng, Xu Tong, Xue Li ; Editor: Xue Li ; Production designers:  Qiu Hongfeng, Wang Haiyuan ; Music: Yang Haisong
Cast: Deng Bin, Xiao Wu, Yang Xu, Sun Xiangyang, Liu Bin, Li Pengbo, Zhang Quanyu, Nie Mengfang
Print source: Xu Ruotao

The brief prologue to visual artist Xu Ruotao’s adventurous debut feature shows youthful Red Guards on the rampage: shouting slogans, waving red flags, trashing the “capitalist-roader bourgeoisie.” It’s everybody’s stereotypical image of the Cultural Revolution, the ten chaotic years (1966-76) in which Mao and his “Gang of Four” acolytes set out to reinvent Chinese communism. We now know that the Cultural Revolution was essentially a political putsch: Mao regained power from Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and ruled (through a fog of dementia) until his death in 1976. But few understood that at the time. The film proper presents itself as a chronicle, chaptered in years from 1966 to 1976, but the action actually proceeds in reverse-chronological order. It opens in the dog years leading up to Mao’s death and the first chapter features the Tangshan earthquake (from 1976), climaxes in the bloody years when the Red Guards ran wild and closes with an idealistic communist hailing the coming upheaval. The longest chapter is 1973, when a gang of roving but already defeated Red Guards occupies an abandoned factory in which a vagrant is sleeping. Xu himself was born in 1968, at the height of Red Guard madness. His film is truly a rumination, a wry attempt to think through the meaning of one of history’s great cycles of idealism and disillusionment. (note by Tony Rayns)

See also David Bordwell’s recent discussion of the film, from his VIFF coverage.

The High Life
(Xunhuan zuole)
(China, 2010, 91 mins, HDCAM)
Directed By: Zhao Dayong
Producers: Zhao Dayang, David Bandurski ; Screnplay: Zhao Dayong, Li Qing ; DP: Xue Gang ; Editors: Zhao Dayong, Wei Chunyi ; Production designer: Wang Jian ; Music: Zhi Ying, Mei Mei
Cast: Qiu Hong, Liu Yanfei, Shen Shaoqiu, Su Qingyi, Diao Lei
Print source:
David Bandurski
Lantern Films China

Celebrated young Chinese documentary filmmaker Zhao Dayong (Ghost Town / Fei cheng, New York Film Festival 2009) has already won several awards for his fascinating first fiction film The High Life (Hong Kong Film Festival 2010).

He tells a bifurcated story: young con artist Jian Ming makes a living in Guangzhou (Canton) China pretending to help migrants from rural areas find jobs. In reality he just takes their money and pins their photos on his wall. Practicing a little classical Chinese opera on the side, he does, once, send an innocent young woman (Xiao Ya) to work in a hair salon, but these establishments are frequently obvious fronts for prostitution in Chinese cities. Jian Ming feels responsible when the local gang boss takes Xiao Ya for a sex worker, with predictably violent results. Moving into pyramid selling schemes, Jian Ming is busted by the police and ends up in prison. The film’s second part shifts with eery inevitability into an entirely different tone and register. It portrays an unusual prison guard Dian Qiu (played by an actual prison guard) who forces the inmates under his supervision to recite, out loud, his sexually and politically subversive poetry.

VIFF audiences who saw Zhao’s experimental short Rough Poetry (Xialiu shige) last year will recognize it as the source for this mid-film turn towards the literary absurd. Zhao’s realist-poetic imagination marries a sharp critical political eye with a subversive absurdist sensibility. Dangerously provocative entertainment, from China’s vibrant independent film sector.

Single Man
(Guanggun)
(China, 2010, 95 mins, HDCAM)
Directed By: Hao Jie
Producers: Li Zhifeng, Yu Huiying ; Screenplay: Hao Qitian, Yang Cuilan, Hao Jie ; DP: Du Pu ; Editor: Hao Jie, Ye Lan, Du Pu ; Production designer: Wang Lei
Cast: Yang Zhenjun, Du Tianguang, Liang Youzhong, Liang Chunying, Ye Lan, Wang Suzhen
Print source:
Li Zhifeng, Heaven Pictures (Beijing) Culture & Media

This is a strange and delightful find from China: a sex comedy, bawdy and a little raunchy, about four elderly farmers. New director Hao Jie, with a bit of Boccaccio and a dollop of Rabelais, shows you a side of rural China you’ve probably never seen before.

Decades ago when they were young, Old Yang had a thing for Eryatou, until her father violently intervened. Liu Ruan was married as a child to an older girl, but seems to prefer the embrace of his mother. Big Head Liang lost a hand while paying more attention to a village beauty than to the grain thresher he was operating. And Gu Lin, in bed with his wife, was caught seducing his young wife’s sister. Now, Eryatou is the village mayor’s wife. Which doesn’t impede her willingness to satisfy the erotic needs of these four now elderly co-villagers when the mayor’s away on business.

Director Hao grew up in a village in rural Hebei, northern China. His childhood memories, and the lives and loves of his relatives and neighbours make up the raw material of this fiction feature. But it’s all based on fact, he says, and all but one of the actors in the film are non-professionals playing themselves, or somewhat fictionalized versions thereof. Which is all the more remarkable considering both the saucy nature of the material, and the genuine vitality and naturalness of the performances. Chinese indie cinema, at its most wryly entertaining.

See also a Variety review by Jonathan Holland.

Crossing the Mountain
(Fan Shan)
(China, 2010, 98 mins, HDCAM-SR)
Directed By: Yang Rui
Producer: Xiao Kaiyu ; Screenplay: Yang Rui ; DP: Liao Ni ; Editors: Kong Jinlei, Yang Rui
Production designer: Li Qiang ; Music: Cheng Huihui
Cast: Chen Qiang, Xiao Yonghua, Xiao Ying, Zhong Lihua
Print source:
Yang Rui , Beijing Culture Broadcasting Co.
Sales contact:
Molly Zheng, United Star Co.

Quite possibly the most mesmerizingly beautiful film from China this year, and definitely one of the most challenging, Yang Rui’s poetic tale of teachers and soldiers wandering in the jungle is a uniquely captivating cinema experience.

Yang experiments with a fictional narrative form but hides most of the story’s connective tissue. In a small forest village deep in Yunnan, right near the border with Burma, we see three teachers, a man and two women, at work and at play. There are dangerous grenades in the jungle, and one teacher instructs his students how to spot them. The students collect twigs, soldiers creep through the brush, and the teachers seem to form something of a love triangle. A television is brought into the village, then is violently attacked. There seems to be a murder and an ensuing investigation, and tales of headhunters and ghosts insinuate themselves into the story’s liminal spaces.

This is a mystery film, full of beautiful landscapes, dreamlike silent connections, eerily gorgeous light. It is a documentary and a story; mythmaking and ethnographic investigation, as tough in its anti-exoticizing savvy as it is captivating in its embrace of an intangible spirituality. Violence lurks in the forest – headhunters, bombs, riflemen – but so do games, puzzles, dances and love.

Winter Vacation
(Hanjia)
(China, 2010, 91 mins, HDCAM)
Directed By: Li Hongqi
Producers: Alex Chung, Ning Cai ; Screenplay & editor: Li Hongqi ; DP: Qin Yurui ; Production designers: Yi Xiaodong, Qin Yurui ; Music: Zuoxiao Zuzhou ; The Top Floor Circus
Cast: Bai Junjie, Zhang Naqi, Bao Jinfeng, Xia Ying, Wang Hui
Print source:
Alex Chung, Ego Sum Mediatore Interculturale

Li Hongqi has slowly been perfecting his style of drop-deadpan humour with philosophical underpinnings: a kind of minimalist sitcom-Kafka, Kaurismaki-cum-Jarmusch blend that is as mesmerizing as it is hilarious. With his third feature Winter Vacation, he hits the bullseye. The mix of slacker teens and semi-comatose adults is perfect; with precociously world-weary little children thrown into the mix. Set against the ultra-drab but ingeniously photographed pre-mixed Chinese instant urban architecture of some benighted remote settlement in Chinese Inner Mongolia, a group of kids convince themselves to spend their winter vacation doing basically nothing. One is a sporadic bully, though he’s not very effective. A chubby kid and his grandfather have a TV room standoff: but it appears that the joke’s on them: the only thing on TV in Inner Mongolia seems to be Li Hongqi’s earlier films.

The ‘action’ (non-action is more like it, attenuated to the extent that one wonders if director Li, a popular poet with university students in China is stealthily implanting some rather sophisticated Buddhist thinking deep inside the film) is punctuated by offbeat chants and a song by China’s most radical independent musician, Zuoxiao Zuzhou. Did we mention that the film was, also, oddly, unnervingly beautiful?

Thomas Mao
(Xiao dongxi)
(China, 2010, 80 mins, DigiBeta)
Directed By: Zhu Wen
Producers: Geng Ling, Zhu Wen ; Screenplay: Zhu Wen ; DP: Wang Min ; Editors: Zhu Wen, Kong Jinlei ; Production designer: Huang Xinming
Cast: Mao Yan, Thomas Rohdewald, Jin Zi, Gou Zi
Print source:
Zhu Wen, China Film Assist

VIFF regular Zhu Wen has never been more dazzling than in his new poetical/philosophical drama Thomas Mao. “Thomas” is a European artist, played by an art curator from Luxembourg. “Mao” is a Chinese farmer, played by famous artist Mao Yan. In the film’s first section, Thomas is trekking in some remote but scenic Chinese backwater and, lost, is taken in by Mao. Neither speak the other’s language, and comic miscommunication rules as Thomas arrogantly demands service, and Mao does his scruffy best to oblige.

Whereupon space aliens descend on Mao’s cabin. But not before a swordsman and a flying goddess do elegant battle on the grasslands. And only after this does the film begin to get seriously weird.

The film’s opening quotation of the ancient philosopher Zhuangzi’s most famous line, suggests what Zhu Wen might be up to here: “Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly. Suddenly he woke up, solid and unmistakably Zhuangzi. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.”

Dreams of the other, the (artificial) borders between self and other, West and East, dreamland and “reality,” fiction and documentary. This audacious, playful, profound film takes on the weightiest subjects with the lightest of touches: be prepared to be amazed.

See also David Bordwell’s recent discussion of the film, from his VIFF coverage.

Aftershock
(Tangshan dadizhen)
(China, 2010, 135 mins, 35mm)
Directed By: Feng Xiaogang
Producers: Chen Kuo-fu, Wang Zhonglei ; Screenplay: Su Xiaowei, based on the novel by Zhang Ling ; DP: Lü Yue ; Editor: Xiao Yang ; Production designer: Huo Tingxiao ; Music: Wang Liguang
Cast: Xu Fan, Zhang Jingchu, Li Chen, Chen Daoming, Chen Jin
Print source: Lana Peng, Huayi Brothers Media Corp.

Feng Xiaogang’s Aftershock is the most popular Chinese blockbuster in history. It has broken every box-office record in China this summer, and established itself as the dominant Chinese cinematic event of this very early Chinese century.

Known mainly for the sardonic hit comedies that established him as China’s box-office king, Feng Xiaogang here tells the story of the survivors of one of China’s greatest natural disasters, the Tangshan Earthquake of 1976. What starts as a disaster movie of Titanic proportions – the brilliantly conceived special effects go far beyond shaky-cam earthquake pics of old – moves quickly to something more deeply moving: a full-throated, classical family melodrama that has become famous for provoking rivers of tears from Chinese audiences.

When the earthquake strikes, father Daqing is immediately crushed, and mother Yuanni (Xu Fan, in a career-defining performance) is forced to make an awful (and thoroughly melodramatic) choice. Her young son Fang Da and daughter Fang Deng are pinned under a slab of concrete: saving one means sacrificing the other. Though both survive, Fang Deng hears her mother’s choice, and the family is sundered. Mother, son and daughter, against the background of 30 years of Chinese history, must find the emotional pathways that allow them to reconnect with each other.

A film can’t be this overwhelmingly successful in contemporary China without simultaneously working as irresistible commercial cinema, crafty propaganda, subtle national-historical mythmaking, cathartic weepie and subtly incisive social critique. Aftershock does it all, full-pitched, unapologetically bold, ostentatiously operatic. Find out what all China is watching and what makes China cry: an unmissable cinematic experience.

See also my discussion of recent Chinese earthquake films at dGenerate.

SHORTS

I selected two shorts from China to precede a couple of the films above, Liu Jiayin’s playful 607 and Ying Liang’s dazzling Condolences.

607
(China, 2010, 17 mins, DVCAM)
Directed By: Liu Jiayin
Producers: Zhang Xianmin, Samantha Culp
Cast: Liu Zaiping, Jia Huifen, Liu Jiaying
Print source: Liu Jiayin, Beijing Film Academy

Six hands, three mushrooms, and one noisy plastic fish. Abstract fun in a bathtub, where father (the hand guiding the fish) knows best?

See also David Bordwell’s description, from his VIFF coverage.

Condolences
(Wei Wen)
(2009, 20 mins)
Directed By: Ying Liang
Producer: Peng Shan ; Screenplay, editor, production design: Ying Liang ; DP: Li Rongsheng ; Ying Liang ; Production design: Li Rongsheng ; Peng Shan
Print source:
Ying Liang, 90 Minutes Film Studio

Bereaved Grandma Chen sits impassively while a TV crew, an official delegation and several workmen buzz around her, in one brilliant virtuoso shot.

See my previous post for dGenerate.

Relevant Classroom Use

It’s interesting to compare this take on overseas Chinese migration with a recent article in the New York Times about how tens of thousands of Chinese migrants have transformed the Italian city of Prato into a low-end textile and garment hub of Europe, with mixed-to-negative reactions by the Italian locals.

But for all the talk of how the impact of Chinese foreign commerce and migrant labor is being felt around the world,  there is much-needed activity happening in the opposite direction, as China serves as a destination for both commercial and cultural exchange. We’ve reported earlier about the interesting “Raiding Africa” project funded by the Rotterdam Film Festival and spearheaded by Gertjan Zuilhof.  He’s submitted several updates on the project during its summer run: entries five and six are particularly interesting in describing how visiting African filmmakers are encountering China, interacting with local Chinese and filming their experiences.

Relevant Classroom Use

Directors Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai and Lou Ye at the Beijing premiere of Wang's Chongqing Blues (photo courtesy of Screening China)

We’ve been following Dan Edwards‘ blog Screening China for the past several weeks, and it’s quickly shaping up to be an important source for reviews on the latest in Chinese film, especially from the indie/arthouse side. Dan, who is based in Beijing, writes for The Beijinger and Real Time Arts, among other publications. We’ve been linking all year to his coverage of our films and filmmakers: a review of Ghost Town;  an interview with Liu Jiayin; a profile on documentary filmmakers; and a recap of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. He’s contributed a lot in a relatively short time, and it’s good to be able to access his content on his blog (which, ironically, is blocked in China).

Here are some recent highlights from his blog:

From his review of Yang Rui’s Crossing the Mountain:

It’s a brave first feature (Yang has apparently previously made documentaries) and at it’s best Crossing the Mountain allows us to sink into the sense of time and space of a pre-modern society existing on the hazy edges of a rapidly modernising nation. As such, it’s a reminder of cinema’s ability to not only tell a story, but transport us into a whole other way of being in the world.

From his review of Ghost Town director Zhao Dayong’s The High Life, which won two awards at HKIFF:

The High Life is a surprising, unsettling film, rich in cynical humour about the nature of power, economics and relationships in contemporary China. Following the unveiling of his acclaimed three-hour documentary Ghost Town last year at the New York Film Festival (see my article on the film for RealTime here), Zhao Dayong is rapidly establishing himself as a major rising talent in Chinese cinema.

Most recently, Dan has front-row coverage of the Beijing premiere of Wang Xiaoshuai’s new film Chongqing Blues, and reports how Jia Zhangke unintentionally upstaged the proceedings.

We look forward to ongoing reports and reviews from Dan’s blog.

Relevant Classroom Use

Street Life (dir. Zhao Dayong)

The Flaherty Film Seminar, a private, weeklong series of screenings and talks with filmmakers, scholars and enthusiasts, concluded another annual edition last month. This year’s Seminar was curated by film critic Dennis Lim with the guiding theme of “Work”. Chinese filmmaker Zhao Dayong attended the seminar, presenting his first two feature films: Street Life and Ghost Town, both distributed by dGenerate.

In ArtForum, Nicholas Rapold points out several highlights of the Seminar, including Zhao Dayong’s films:

Zhao Dayong’s lauded Ghost Town (2009) conjures a marginal community in the provinces—a former Communist workers’ village perched in the mountains. Its unification of artistry (Zhao trained as an oil painter) with social portraiture made the centrally placed film a capstone to the week’s percolating dialogue on how work forges identity. Accordingly, Zhao’s embedded look at the Shanghai homeless, Street Life (2006), offered a fascinating vision of unmade man: a prolonged finale showing one of the subjects (recently beaten by police) engaged in demented Situationist crumping in a public square under a Jumbotron.

The full article can be accessed at ArtForum.

Relevant Classroom Use