Over the course of six years Zhao Dayong (趙大勇), an independent filmmaker from Guangzhou, China, spent many months living among the residents of Zhiziluo, an impoverished and forgotten village in the rugged mountains near the Myanmar border, and filming their lives.
Using his own money and simple digital filmmaking equipment he made Ghost Town (廢城), a quiet, hypnotizing, three-hour documentary that provides an extraordinary and intimate portrait of Chinese life.
Like independent filmmakers everywhere, Zhao worked with no guarantee of an audience, or even a place to show his work. By his estimates only a few thousand people have seen Ghost Town in China since he finished it last year. Several hundred saw it Sunday afternoon when the film premiered at the New York Film Festival.
But what makes Zhao’s commitment particularly noteworthy is that his project was apparently illegal.
The Chinese government has decreed that all films must be approved by government censors before being distributed and screened, including in overseas film festivals.
Zhao, 39, said getting the approval of the censors was never a consideration. “It’s like asking to be raped,” he said this month in an interview here. “The government certainly has its own agenda. They want us to stop. But at the same time we know we’re doing something meaningful.”
This mixture of defiance and principle defines China’s nascent yet highly dynamic crop of independent filmmakers who pursue their art in apparent violation of the law.
For decades the Chinese government had nearly full control over all aspects of the film industry, from celluloid filmmaking technology to financing to distribution and screening. An underground filmmaking subculture emerged in China in the late 1980s, but it began to flourish only about a decade ago with the advent of inexpensive digital cameras and postproduction computer programs that helped put filmmaking further out of reach of the government authorities.
Many of this latest generation of Chinese filmmakers have no formal film training and shoot on minimal budgets, often with small crews, or alone. Ying Liang (應亮), whose films have won numerous prizes on the international circuit, shot his widely celebrated debut film, Taking Father Home (背鴨子的男孩), using a borrowed camera. Relatives and friends were his cast and crew.
“Unlike in previous generations, the stars of this generation are not only Beijing Film Academy graduates,” said Karin Chien, a film producer in New York and president of dGenerate Films, a company she founded last year to distribute this new crop of independent Chinese films outside China. “They’re journalists, they work at television stations, they’re painters, they’re people who just picked up a camera and made a film for US$1,000.”
Output is still small. Several leading filmmakers put the annual production of unsanctioned, independent films at fewer than 200. But this work has provided unusual ground-level views of China that possess an unvarnished authenticity often missing from mainstream, government-sanctioned films.
“There’s been an extraordinary explosion of young filmmakers — quite a few of them are quite talented — who are dedicated to record and tell the real story of what’s going on in China,” said Richard Pena, program director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which produces the New York Film Festival. “That story is really more fascinating than the story that the regime wanted to be told.”
These achievements have come at a price.
About 20 filmmakers have been banned from making films for two to five years, according to Zhang Xianmin (張獻民), an independent film producer and a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. Others have received intimidating phone calls, had tapes confiscated or been detained and interrogated.
But according to several filmmakers and film scholars both here and abroad, the government recently appears to have adopted a somewhat hands-off, though highly watchful, posture toward this film vanguard, leaving it to operate in an undefined gray area.
It seems that as long as certain incendiary topics are not broached — among them the Tiananmen Square massacre, Tibet, the Cultural Revolution, the outlawed religious group Falun Gong — then independent filmmakers are allowed to work.
Yet no one is absolutely sure where the boundaries are, or whether the government will start to clamp down more fiercely.
“You don’t know where that limit is,” said Zhang Yaxua (張亞璇), a critic and documentary filmmaker who is organizing an independent film archive for the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. “You have to try to touch it. In the process of trying, you know.”
Huang Wenhai (黃文海), a documentary filmmaker in Beijing, said that the process of filmmaking here “is the process of conquering your fear.”
Despite this pressure and uncertainty, there are now at least four major independent film festivals around the country and at least two theaters, both small, dedicated to showing Chinese independent films.
Meanwhile Chinese audiences largely remain out of reach. With cinemas and television off limits to their unsanctioned films, independent moviemakers are mostly restricted to screenings in front of small audiences in art galleries, bars, universities and homes.
As a result the most accomplished filmmakers have found their largest audiences overseas, especially at international film festivals.
“I feel very frustrated,” Zhao said. “I’m a Chinese filmmaker, and of course my audience should be the Chinese people, especially since my films are about ordinary working Chinese people.” He added, “That would be more valuable than winning an international film festival.”
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Last week the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said that the budget cuts voted for by the China-aligned parties in the legislature, are intended to force the DPP to hike electricity rates. The public would then blame it for the rate hike. It’s fairly clear that the first part of that is correct. Slashing the budget of state-run Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) is a move intended to cause discontent with the DPP when electricity rates go up. Taipower’s debt, NT$422.9 billion (US$12.78 billion), is one of the numerous permanent crises created by the nation’s construction-industrial state and the developmentalist mentality it
Experts say that the devastating earthquake in Myanmar on Friday was likely the strongest to hit the country in decades, with disaster modeling suggesting thousands could be dead. Automatic assessments from the US Geological Survey (USGS) said the shallow 7.7-magnitude quake northwest of the central Myanmar city of Sagaing triggered a red alert for shaking-related fatalities and economic losses. “High casualties and extensive damage are probable and the disaster is likely widespread,” it said, locating the epicentre near the central Myanmar city of Mandalay, home to more than a million people. Myanmar’s ruling junta said on Saturday morning that the number killed had
RSS