Ghost Town (dir. Zhao Dayong)

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

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

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

Further details and trailer after the break.

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

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

Trailer:

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Zhao Dayong achieves an extraordinary intimacy with his subjects, no doubt partly due to the amount of time he spent living in the town, but also through his approach to the filmmaking process. The nature of digital camera technology allowed him to work without a professional crew and instead recruit townspeople to help with the shoot. Zhao explains, “I had three people assisting me, all local villagers. For example, the truck driver who appears in part two of the film often helped me with sound recording. This way I was able to maintain close relationships with people in the village.”

At one level the townspeople of Zhiziluo are clearly victims of China’s new economic order, which has seen major coastal cities greatly enriched at the expense of rural areas. Zhao resists straightforward socio-economic analysis however, instead implying the aimless existence of the town’s inhabitants is symptomatic of a broader malaise. “Through the town I began to see and reflect on my own life”, Zhao says of his experiences shooting Ghost Town. “A process of self-reflection is, for me, the essence of filmmaking. As I was living with these people I came to realize just how uncertain their lives and fates were. The empty government buildings in which they live do not belong to them, and the fate of the place itself, of its architecture, was also in question. They were merely floating in the world, without any sense of safety and security, and their existential condition was basically no different from my own.”

Ghost Town doesn’t purport to provide solutions to the situations it depicts, but rather asks viewers to consider, along with the filmmaker and the town’s residents, how we find meaning in a world seemingly without philosophical or ideological bearings. As Zhao Dayong comments, “Film, like painting, is a method and technique of thought. All forms of creativity are rooted in this question—how to think and reflect.” The tragedy is that Chinese audiences are largely excluded from this process. Mainland television broadcasts only state-approved products and commercial cinemas are only permitted to screen licensed films, meaning documentaries like Ghost Town are rarely seen inside the People’s Republic. Fortunately for international audiences, the questions Ghost Town poses resonate far beyond China’s borders.

Read the full review at RealTime Arts.

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Zhao Dayong

“How China is using art (and artists) to sell itself to the world” is an informative and insightful article in The Star by Murray Whyte. It analyzes China’s recent boom in cultural and media industries and its discontents—a burgeoning scene of individual expression. dGenerate directors Ou Ning and Zhao Dayong and producer David Bandurski are featured in the article as prominent representatives of the alternative art scene.

For Whyte, China’s recent supports and displays of cultural development reflect the government’s deep desire to raise “soft power”– “the ability of a political body to get what it wants through cultural or ideological attraction”–in order to match its huge economic development. The efforts include the plans for new museums and “creative districts” nationwide, proliferation of a glossy magazine industry that embraces Western excess, participation in global cultural events such as the Frankfurt Book Fair, the induction of formerly underground filmmakers back into state-run studios, and the production of big-budget political blockbusters such as The Founding of a Republic.

These splashy, showy displays, contrary to common expectation, do not indicate progress in free expression. Artist and activist Ou Ning, whom the article identifies as a “tireless campaigner for cultural freedom,” refers to the overwhelming urban reconstruction making place for the creative districts as “trading a specific brand of artistic freedom for a broader tyranny.” Commenting on the burgeoning media and culture landscape, David Bandurski (producer of Ghost Town) of Hong Kong University’s China Media Project notes, “This has nothing to do with the vibrancy of culture, or the diversity of culture.” Instead, he continues, “[The government] wants a renaissance, but they want it to happen under party control.”

Beneath this superficial and artificial glamor, the article also notices a “thriving underground scene” that represents a “new kind of expression that has sprouted amid the state-mandated cultural flowering.” Documentary film, as the article quotes Ou Ning again, is the country’s new frontier for individual expression. Among them, Ghost Town by Zhao Dayong and San Yuan Li by Ou Ning and Cao Fei both depict abandoned landscapes and lives, one left “on the distant margins of a country pushed into modernization overdue,” the other “swallowed by Guangzhou’s land-gobbling development.” Although Zhao Dayong defines his work as more individual expression than political act, Ou Ning and Whyte both see the progressive effects of this growing individual expression. The article concludes with Ou’s remark, “Everyone to make a small change in their daily lives. That’s how society can change: individually, step by step, by all of us.”

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Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town is about alienation and distance, about aimless wanderers and broken hearts, yet it is shot with the tenderness of a root-seeking journey. In this three-hour documentary, the meditative rhythm parallels the pace of life depicted. The scale of screen time embodies the scale of lost history the film tries to capture through extraordinary visual sensitivity.

Life in Zhiziluo Village lingers between an irretrievably lost past and an unfulfilled promise of a future. In Part One, “Voices,” local Christian pastors, a father and a son, preach the doctrines learned from American missionaries back in the pre-revolutionary age, and parse the Old Testament for laws to follow in daily life. Their devotion and calmness, however, can hardly conceal the father’s traumatic memory of twenty years of prison for faith and the growing estrangement between the two generations.

In Part Two, “Recollections,” various people are forced to leave their homeland for unknown destinations: young men look for jobs in the city; young women are swindled or sold into marriages in afar provinces; a middle-aged divorcee faces the perspective of losing his homestead due to the government’s development plan. For them, life in the village will soon become mere recollections.

Part Three, “Innocence” portrays the seemingly carefree life of a 12-year old boy, abandoned by his family and catching wild birds for food. When he and other local youngsters perform a Lisu fire exorcism near the end of the film, we return to the age-old ghost worship mentioned by the elder pastor at the beginning. Life forms a circle. Progress and future, as embodied by the huge statue of Mao overlooking the town from a deserted former county hall, seem to have forsaken the land.

What distinguishes the film from other contemporary Chinese films about abandonment and oblivion is its scrupulous attention to details and the meaning and dignity it endows these details. In nightmarish case studies like Jia Zhangke’s Unknown Pleasures (2002) or apocalyptic fables like Ying Liang’s The Other Half (2006), homeland becomes wasteland. The characters, through their daily frustration and doomed attempts at escape or change, manifest the barren urban landscapes. Ghost Town, on the other hand, regularly punctuates the portraits of anguish and anger with calmly observed and compassionately recorded daily routine and toil. Through Zhao’s humanistic, observational camera, cooking, lighting the fire, feeding chicken, hard travels along the winding mountain roads, even animal slaughter on the streets, all acquire the same ritualistic sanctity as the Christian sermons and the Christmas banquet that are at the center of the village’s spiritual life, and the source of its hope.

Rituals and customs of remote, minority regions have long been a fascination of Chinese Han artists. Feature films like Tian Zhuangzhuang’s On the Hunting Ground (1985), set in Mongolia, and Horse Thief (1986), set in Tibet, and documentaries like Duan Jinchuan’s Tibet trilogy, all feature rituals as a basic form of existence for the local people. Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain (1990) also uses the protagonist’s trip along the border of Sichuan and Tibet and among minorities such as Qiang, Miao, and Yi peoples to embody “one man’s quest for inner peace and freedom” (Mabel Lee, in her introduction to the English translation of the novel). In his essay “Getting Real: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Post-socialism,” Chris Berry analyzes the paradoxical status of these regions and peoples as some kind of “others” within China, which enables the filmmakers to “express the sense of alienation and distance from their own culture felt by many educated Chinese amid the disillusionment of the post-Mao era.”

In a later essay “2005: The Power and Pain of the New Documentary Movement,” Lu Xinyu decodes the revived allegorical meaning of rural and minority regions in the digital-generation documentaries. In her example of Sun Yueling’s The Book of Winds (Feng Jing), the filmmaker follows a Tibetan Buddhist lama and his two students on a pilgrimage to the sacred Mount Kawakarpo, and treats their simple joy and devotion as a counterpoint to life in globalized civilization. Lu notes:

As the city and modernization no longer nourishes utopia, but only symbolizes its disillusionment, nostalgia (for the rural roots—as the Chinese term implies inherently) becomes a refusal of, and reflection on, modernization. The result is not only a continuation of the exploration in the 1980s, but also a homage to the dignity and value of the people living and suffering in today’s countryside.

Ghost Town is a highly aestheticized exploration of this tradition. Zhiziluo Village is also a special witness of the gravity of China’s urbanization and modernization. As Mr. Zhao mentioned in the Q&A after the NYFF screening, the village, originally occupied by the Lisu and Nu minorities, is an abandoned county seat from the Mao era. Now only the local peasants were left behind on the urbanized wasteland. The film contrasts the effortless beauty of the rural landscape with the dilapidated three-storied buildings and the desolate streets. Often kept at a distance, nature not only serves as a backdrop to human suffering and dignity at the foreground, but locates the people on the land.

Against this backdrop, the meticulously recorded religious and folk ceremonies and the daily rituals become substitutes for the lost roots and severed links to the soil, tradition and ancestry that would endow life with meaning. One of the most memorable rituals in the film is a rustic, religious funeral on top of the mountain. Starting with a striking image of a young man carrying a wooden cross climbing the mountain, the funeral merges a gospel chorus with the local tradition of chanting lamentation. When the ritual ends with a body buried and a new tomb sealed, the question about root and meaning is directed to us, the living.

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

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

The complete interview can be accessed here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bandurski brothers Jonathan and Ghost Town producer David

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I finished watching Ghost Town last night. It’s a very fine film indeed. One of the reviews mentioned Jia Zhangke. But I immediately thought of Wang Bing. The three-part structure, the epic historical theme with larger social implications, the patient observational filmmaking, the people speaking to camera but the filmmaker’s own absence, all these things made me think of Wang Bing. And like his films, it has a strong sense of historical consciousness, an eye for unique material, and a real sympathy for the people in the film and their tough lives. It’s a testament to the continuing strength of the Chinese documentary movement.

The craft, the skill, is partly in the filming but also very much in the editing, and that’s how the filmmaker draws us through the work. The ending, which takes us back to the opening section with its emphasis on Christianity, but then focuses on the Mao statue that has been lurking there in the background throughout (again due to thoughtful choices in the editing) is very powerful, opening all kinds of questions about the impact of different ideologies from outside the town at different times (and of course the impact of other things — like alcohol), and how the villagers are desperate for effective help, but that the things they turn to do not always turn out to be so useful. Watching a film like this, I am reminded again of how important editing is, and what a pity it is not widely recognized as a separate skill in China.

There have been a few independent documentaries and feature films that have dealt with Christianity in China recently. As an atheist, I must admit that I usually find anything that reminds me of how prevalent Christianity is again in China and the inroads it is making very disturbing. I know the situation in China is complicated by the collapse of old socialist values, and a very real experience of abandonment by the state on the part of poor people. As we see in the first part of Ghost Town, the church not only gives them a set of values, but it also supports them materially and socially. Indeed, I assume that part of what that edit at the end of the film is doing is drawing our attention to how Mao took the place occupied by the church before the revolution and now the church is fill the gap occupied by the collapse of Maoism. The films that bother me the most are the ones that seem to proselytizing. For example, I was quite disturbed by Gan Xiao’er’s Raised from Dust, which is also in your catalogue and seemed to me to see suffering as ennobling. Of course, that leads many of its supporters to compare it to Bresson. That’s intended as a great compliment. However, I must admit I have the same problem with Bresson, so maybe it’s just me! With Ghost Town, however, the film seems to be simply observing that, and so although I find the facts worrying, I’m not so bothered about the film.

One of the most notable things is that after all the talk about how Chinese documentary film has become “individualized” or “personal” (gerenhua) over the last ten years, with a retreat from observational towards personal filmmaking, this film does not fit that pattern at all. It’s classic observational filmmaking, with no voiceover and just a few titles to orient the viewer. So, maybe it makes us think more about what “individualized” or “personal” filmmaking in China means. I’ve been working with Lisa Rofel and Lu Xinyu to finish an anthology on China’s New Documentary Movement for the Hong Kong University Press this summer (we hope it will be out next year) and we’ve been having a lot of conversations about this. For some filmmakers, it may be about putting themselves in the film or focusing on their personal lives. But for others, it’s about the way in which the arrival of DV technology has enabled them to make films by themselves, without a crew. That’s what Wu Wenguang talked about in his essay on “Individual Filmmaking” (originally published as “Yige Ren de Yingxiang” in Jingtou xiang ziji de yanjing yiyang (Shanghai: Shanghai Yishu Chubanshe, 2001) 257-263, and translated for Cinema Journal 46, no.1 (2006): 136-140 by Cathryn Clayton.) That essay is all about how the DV liberates him as an individual filmmaker. In that sense, I guess this is an individual film, because it seems to have been made by Zhao Dayong alone, and so are Wang Bing’s films.

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Ghost Town, Zhao Dayong’s 2008 documentary about the residents of the Southwest Chinese town Zhiziluo, makes its International Premiere this Sunday at the New York Film Festival.  Film critics who attended the press screening have already given the film high marks.  Here are some highlights:

“Directed with scrupulous attention to detail by Zhao Dayong.” – Manohla Dargis, The New York Times, “The Serious Regard for Cinema”

“One of the fest’s prime discoveries” – Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York, “NYFF Top Picks”

“Give Ghost Town 15 minutes, and you won’t be able to shut it off… as compelling as any in the festival.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice, “Five Must-See Films From the NYFF”

“A heavyweight… It sure disproves one villager’s quip, cheekily placed near the beginning of the doc: ‘Go ahead and film, but there’s nothing worth filming here!’” – Nicolas Rapold, Village Voice, “NYFF: This Year’s Documentaries”

“3 out of 4 stars!  Dayong’s direction exudes compassionate intimacy with regard to both individuals and spaces.” – Nick Schager, Slant Magazine, “Review: Ghost Town”

“One of the most heartbreaking films to yet emerge from China’s prolific documentary movement.” – Andrew Chan, Reverse Shot, “Ghost Town”

“So rich in detail and incident that when it ended… I felt as if I’d just returned from a week-long visit. Ghost Town casts a powerful spell.” – Nelson Kim, Hammer to Nail, “Must-Sees at the 47th NYFF“

“Hypnotic” – Vadim Rizov, GreenCine Daily, “NYFF ‘09“

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

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David Bandurski (photo by Bonnie Bandurski)

An award-winning journalist, David Bandurski is currently a writer and researcher for the China Media Project, a research program of the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. His writings have appeared in Far Eastern Economic Review, the Wall Street Journal, Index on Censorship, the South China Morning Post and other publications. He received a Human Rights Press Award in 2008 for an investigative piece for the Far Eastern Economic Review on China’s use of professional associations to enforce Internet censorship guidelines. David was also co-recipient of a Merit Prize in Commentary in 2007. Mr. Bandurski’s involvement with China’s nascent independent documentary scene began in 2005, as he made contact with several filmmakers while writing about the movement. Realizing the power of digital video technology, Mr. Bandurski decided to turn a planned long-form narrative article about the African community in Guangzhou into a documentary feature. This began a long and fruitful collaboration with Guangzhou-based filmmaker Zhao Dayong.

In this interview, dGenerate Films’ Kevin Lee talks to David Bandurski about his involvement with Ghost Town and director Zhao Dayong, the film’s reception both in China and abroad, and his ongoing work with the China Media Project.

Note: This interview was conducted with David via Skype. There are occasional moments of audio breakup. A full transcript follows after the break.

Play the Podcast (Time: 24:47)

Download audio file (CinemaTalkDavidBandurski.mp3)

Download it here (right-click on the link, select “Save As”, file size: 11.3 MB)

DGF: I want to ask you many questions about your involvement in the film given that it’s an independent documentary produced in China, but you’re a American.  And I want to know about your relationship with Zhao Dayong. How did you get involved with him and how did you get involved with producing his films?

DB: I guess I could start with this movement, as some people call it, coming to my attention, and that was in 2005.  I was already in Hong Kong and I was focusing in my research at the University here on journalism in China, and specifically on investigative reporting in China, and I was looking at the work that Chinese journalists were doing in a really tough environment. At one point, I think it was spring of 2005, we had a visiting fellow form Fudan University, Lu Xinyu. You may know that name: Lu Xinyu has written a book about Chinese independent documentary, and its called China’s New Documentary Movement.  So we had Lu Xinyu for several weeks and we were sharing an office and I looked over one day and she had a stack of films, DVDs sitting there. They all had these kind of black and white, obscure looking covers, and they looked very homemade, and I asked her what those were. She gave me a couple to take home and explained that these were independent films. They weren’t approved through the official approval system. I recognized immediately that this was something really special. In a way, they were accomplishing what a lot of the traditional press work that I was looking at couldn’t and it was just really good solid non-fiction for me.

Dayong and I just hit it off immediately.  I did the subtitle work on Street Life, and already in the works at that time was Ghost Town. We started working on Ghost Town, and we also started My Father’s House quite early because I was making trips back to forth to Guangzhou doing a lot of non-fiction writing myself and the next big piece I had planned was on the growing African migrant community in Guangzhou.  So I said why don’t we do this as a documentary film, why don’t we collaborate on this, so that’s how it all started.

DGF: Let’s focus specifically on Ghost Town and specifically your responsibilities in the production of the film, and any particular challenges you faced in the production of this film.

DB: I’ve been involved quite early on in our working relation, Ghost Town was one of the central projects and in early 2006, even as we were completing the post production on Street Life and beginning to work on My Father’s House, Dayong was making a few trips to Zhiziluo and filming that story and he said, “Look I’m going to make a big trip in late summer, in the fall. Why don’t you come over at Christmastime and spend a few weeks and watch me working?” And I did that and it was an amazing experience. I encourage that anyone go to this area, its just a beautiful area.

If I explain my role for Ghost Town I think translation in the larger sense, in the bigger sense.  So that was huge when you consider that the original languages here are Lisu and Nu dialects and some Mandarin. That was one of the largest tasks. One of the things to recognize about Dayong’s strengths in filming this as well, if you can imagine him spending weeks immersed in this environment and he doesn’t speak Lisu or Nu, but he has a very keen eye for situations and understanding what’s going on around him.

DGF: So if he doesn’t understand the native dialects, how was he able to communicate with the subjects in the film?

DB: Well most them speak at least rudimentary Mandarin.  So you can communicate and get some sense of what’s going on around you.  If you take a scene in the film, where Pu Biqiu and his girlfriend, in the middle section of the film, are sitting down around the fire in her home, and her father starts explaining that money is really tight right now, and he’s selling her into a marriage to ameliorate the situation.  Of course you have a sense of what’s going on there.  But in the moment it was all going on in Lisu so he had no idea what the dialogue was.

DGF: Speaking of the issue of translation, I’d like to learn more about how this film has translated to its audiences, both domestically in China and internationally. First of all, how have you gotten the film screened to both audiences?

DB: For the domestic Chinese audience, honestly we kind of just had to throw up our hands.  There are unfortunately a limited number of forums; some would argue a growing number, but I would say a growing number of limited forums inside China, in academic settings were we can screen these films, generally.  But we kind of know what these forums are, and we kind of know those limited audiences and it’s a non-issue.  We will go to YunFest in Kunming and participate in CIFF in Nanjing, but that’s a fundamental problem for all of his films, is reaching a larger audience. There’s no answer for it right now.  And so I think that most Chinese filmmakers just have to push on to reach the audience they can in China.

But I’m speaking of internationally, getting it seen internationally, sending it to international festivals. I’ve shared it with so many people, festivals, mainly in Europe, China studies people, journalism and mass communications, comparative literature. And this was all through 2008 and I think I started wondering what was wrong that we couldn’t find the right people to appreciate it.  And people would dismiss it with really ignorant comments, like it needed more voiceovers or tighter editing, as though we were doing an action flick or something. Some people said it rambled on and needed more contextualizing. There was even the suggestion that it was disrespectful to the audience for it to run as long as it did, saying it was way to long. And to be fair, this was a person with a television background who said that it had to be cut to 49 minutes or we’d never get any attention to it.  So it was really frustrating to find the right kind of people to see the film and appreciate it.

One festival actually asked us to cut down and I remember discussing this with Dayong, it was for a festival in Europe,  “Do you have a shorter version, if it was 120 minutes or something, they might be interested.” I discussed with Dayong and of course he grumbled a lot but I think he cut 30 minutes from the version that we’ll screen at the NYFF and it must have been an excruciating process. We finally realized that it was wrong for us to even consent to that. And besides, we never heard back. So I think I was very naïve in expecting such courtesy from these festivals. But it was a long and discouraging process, so we’re really happy that the NYFF has seen it for what it is because it is a really beautiful film.

As I told you I spent about three weeks in Zhiziluo watching him film, and I can tell you from being there that the way the film moves, including its length, you need to have the treatment that Dayong gives it. You couldn’t do it in a shorter version. He has completely captured the pace of life in Zhiziluo. So people should understand that, if they are willing to be patient with the film and give it its just due, then they’ll appreciate its beauty.

DGF: Again, it was great that the NYFF jury responded so positively to it and understood what the film was about.  Just a couple of the quotes from the jury members: Dennis Lim said that it was “one of the most surprising and rewarding films he’s seen all year, one of the most important films to emerge from the booming but still under explored field of Chinese independent documentaries.” Scott Foundas said that he “didn’t think there was another Jia Zhang-ke or Wang Bing lurking out there but it turns out there is.”  But I’m curious, to go back to the limited but still solid Chinese independent film festival circuit: film festivals, gallery exhibitions.  It’s a very small and somewhat self selecting circle but it has grown to a national size and scope between Beijing, Nanjing, Yunan, Kunming and all parts in between.  So I’m curious, what is the response to give a sense of the native, for lack of a better word, context and appreciation to the film in contrast to the international reception that the film has received?

DB: The film screened in May 2008, it was at the 5^th China Documentary Film Festival. The Li Xianting Film Fund puts on that festival every year. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend, I was out of the country at the time.  It won the Independent Spirit Award, along with another film and it got a very favorable reception there. I was talking to Dayong afterwards and he said everyone loved it. Everyone was talking about how this was the film of the year, the documentary of the year. It kind of raised the bar.  It’s a beautiful film, it’s not as rough and tumble as lot of the documentaries you see filmed on DV.  It lends itself to a theatre environment as well, and the scenes are so gorgeous.  And Dayong was so successful at getting inside this community.  So a lot of people were talking the film and of course this was a contrast with the reception we were getting from festivals outside China.  But I remember clearly the comments that one of the judges made during the May 28 festival, that it was one of the most ambitious films of the festival and he said that the director gave us ample time to absorb what’s before us, he gives us ample time to absorb and reflect the circumstances, or something like that, which I think captures one of the things I was saying before, about Dayong’s patience in the filming process. But a lot of independent directors in China have spoken very highly of the film. People like Wu Wengguang, who is considered kind of the father of the independent film movement in China.  So it had a very strong reception throughout 2008.  So it’s wonderful that at the end of 2009 we’re revisiting it.

DGF: Does the film sort of emblematize what we could call a Chinese documentary filmmaking aesthetic?  From what you’ve seen, based on your own observations, do you think we could say there’s such a thing as a dominant Chinese aesthetic towards documentary filmmaking?  Is it something that’s very distinguishable from documentaries that you see in the US or elsewhere?

DB: It’s really tough to define and its sort of dangerous.  In Lu Xinyu’s book she’s talking about these films as a movement and I always find myself using the word “movement” and I want to slap my own hand and say “be careful.” Because if you talk to the directors they may see a difference between their films and that of another. Dayong he may feel a sense of camaraderie and the sense of being a part of the same scene. There’s a filmmaker named Zhou Hao. You may be familiar with him he made film called Using that was out this year about drug addicts in Guangzhou.  But their films are so different. If you try to boil it down to an aesthetic I think it’s really difficult.

So aesthetically it’s a much more difficult thing to put your finger on, but what I always go back to, and again this isn’t a focus that the directors themselves necessarily have, but what I always go back to are the institutional issues in China with making a film.  These are independent films in China not because of their low budget, or that they’re made outside a dominant production culture. They’re independent, really because they’re illegal, technically. They don’t go through the licensing process, the don’t ask the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, ‘Can we?’ They don’t give them a script and say, “Approve this and we’ll go and film it.” They’re not renegades in that sense, they’re not out to make an explicit political point or go up against the authorities.  But they’re making use of this strange gray space that exists outside this regulatory and censorship environment.  That is the real fundamental for them as independent filmmakers.

You mentioned the word underground, and that’s interesting because I haven’t talked to a whole lot of directors, but I’ve talked to Dayong of course about this, and most of them shy away from the term “underground” because the term underground suggests something nefarious or illegal.  But they’re quite open about it, often surprisingly open and bold about the way that they film these.  Actually when we were in Yunnan, it’s not in the film but there was a situation where one of the villagers cut down a tree and this is a very common crime in this part of the country.  By selling firewood they make some extra money but it’s protected forest.  So he was taken in to the police station to take care of this situation and Dayong just walked in there with the camera with every intention of filming that entire thing.  And there was a whole back and forth where they told him don’t film in here, but his first thought not “Can I do it, how can I do it, do I need a tiny little camera?” No, he just walked in there with his camera on his shoulder, so when they make these films they don’t really have any consideration as to whether they’re approved or not, so in that sense they’re very free.

Sometimes I like to call them the only real truly free media in china.  And I mean that in terms of the production process.  Obviously, you have blogs, and things like this, the Internet, and you have certain spaces where people can express themselves, but there are certain technological mechanisms of censorship you can’t avoid.  But these filmmakers never think about it, throughout the entire process of filming. It’s about the film they want to make and that goes through the post-production process and the final product, so in that sense they’re a very unique look at a whole range of social and political issues in China.  So that’s the sense I think of them as independent, I may have gotten away from your question…

DGF: I think that’s a very relevant point that sometimes what defines a movement is a spirit, a philosophy of how do approach a subject matter, not so much the technique or a style…

DB: That’s right, I mean if you start to look at the filmmakers, they’re backgrounds are so diverse and that’s one of the distinguishing characteristics, if you start to look at this…. again I was about to call it a movement, you look at this scene and you have filmmakers like Hu Jie who’s done a lot of historical films on the anti-rightist movement, on the Cultural Revolution. By background he’s an official Xin Hua news agency photographer, he is no longer but he used to be.  And Zhao Hao comes from a news background.  Some, like Ou Ning, are artists and filmmakers and Dayong comes from a background in painting.  Some are academics or dissidents.  So it’s amazing, just the diversity just among the filmmakers themselves.

DGF: Right, as well as your background, which I’d like to speak to a little bit because not only are you a film producer, but you’re a journalist and a media analyst and you’re a staff member of the China Media Project, which I’d like you to tell our listeners more about.  What is the China Media Project, its mission and its activities?

DB: We focus on analysis of the broader media environment in China, and also political reform, such as it is, as it’s reflected through discussion in the Chinese media.  We look at the Internet, but we also look at print media and how its changing and that’s not always change in the positive sense but change in the sense of how the formal control censorship is changing in China, so we’re looking at that on a day to day, case by case basis. And a big thing we do is bring in top journalists from Mainland China in our fellows program and they’ll spend a few weeks and write research papers about their own experiences as journalists.

I was saying earlier, one of my big projects in the past few years has been looking at investigative reporting in China, which is really under a threat.  We’re kind of looking back now on a Golden Age of investigative reporting from the late 90s from ’98-’99 till 2003 and now it starting to disappear. This is a function of how the control changes in the leadership. I have a book coming out later this year that goes through some of these major cases of investigative reporting in China and how they happened in this really restrictive environment.

It’s often a surprise for people to hear that investigative reporting even exists, but again that relates to this film as well. Because this is still one of the bright spots when you look at the broader media environment in China, when you look at the issue of free expression in China.  These films are so expressive and they give no consideration or very little consideration to the control mechanisms or to the authorities. They are just creating in this completely gray environment. This also relates to the issue of domestic distribution and forums domestically and that’s the real conundrum.  That’s the real big wall for this scene or for these films in terms of their longer-term development, because to the extent that they’re invisible in China, they’re acceptable in China, and that’s the great tragedy.  As soon as they started to get any sort of real broader distribution or bigger public forums, they would instantly become a problem, because the authorities have not changed their overall approach to control of the media and the arts and culture.  It’s still quite restrictive and it’s still a major priority for the Communist Party related to social stability and maintaining social stability.  So I think that right now directors like Zhao Dayong are enjoying this gray area nebulous space that they have right now.

DGF: David Bandurski, member of the Chinese Media Project and producer of Ghost Town, thank you for being with us today.

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