“The Future of Independent Documentary in China” was the focus of a recent panel at the University of Southern California, where as part of the Visible Evidence documentary conference, Luke Robinson of the University of Sussex led a discussion amongst Chinese cinema scholars and filmmakers including independent filmmaker Zhu Rikun, Jenny Chio of USC, Michael Berry of UCLA, and Sabrina Qiong Yu of the University of Newcastle.

These scholars and filmmakers, all based outside of China, positioned the panel as an opportunity to look back at the devastation of documentary communities in recent years, examine the current landscape for independent documentary, and engage in a community-oriented dialogue making sense of the questions that have always stalked China’s documentary makers – do the challenges facing Chinese documentary communities represent a death knell or the opportunity for a transformation? Where do we go from here?

The Present of Independent Documentary in China

In his self-introduction during the “The Future of Independent Documentary in China” panel, Zhu Rikun – director of such films as Dust and The Dossier, and a leader of the Chinese independent film community now living in the United States – told a story about a retrospective screening of his work at another North American university. Zhu’s documentary work, which is largely concerned with images and language that expose the injustices in Chinese power structures, seemed to hit a member of the audience hard. “He was a man from Mainland China, but he was shouting in English,” Zhu recalled, “saying it was shameful to show this dark side of China.” The man continued to shout, rejecting Zhu’s attempts to speak up on behalf of his film. “This is a typical story,” Zhu told the audience at USC, “so if this kind of hostility is typical at a screening outside of China, you can just imagine how bad it is in China.”

Independent documentary in China has never had an easy life. In the past twenty-five years, nonfiction filmmaking communities in China developed a filmmaking practice independent of the state, the domestic commercial film market, and more often than not, official narratives of Chinese history and social movements. The climate for these films was never exactly comfortable, but for a number of years in the 2000s and 2010s, film festivals all over China brought independent filmmakers and scholars together as a supportive community; international festivals celebrated the artistic achievements and activist spirit of Chinese documentary filmmakers; and mentorship programs like the extant Wu Wenguang Documentary Memory Project gave young people cameras and initiative to interrogate the past and forge a new nonfiction storytelling culture. Films about environmental devastation, state abuse of workers and minorities, the largely-unexamined crimes of the Cultural Revolution era, queer and feminist histories of China, and dozens of other “unofficial” stories came into the world through these documentary communities, creating what panel moderator Luke Robinson called an “alternative archive” of Chinese history and society.

Films about environmental devastation, state abuse of workers and minorities, the largely-unexamined crimes of the Cultural Revolution era, queer and feminist histories of China, and dozens of other “unofficial” stories came into the world through these documentary communities, creating…an “alternative archive” of Chinese history and society.

In 2019, the situation for independent documentary in China is one of tight state scrutiny, dissolved communities, and dim optimism. Many significant independent festivals have been closed down, film archives have been seized by state authorities, and filmmaking communities have largely been forced to disband – leaving filmmaking and critical practice scattered. Chinese independent films are increasingly barred from appearing at international festivals; and a wolf in sheep’s clothing has arrived at China’s box office in the form of commercial films that co-opt the lo-fi cinematic language and anti-aesthetic of independent documentaries to tell state-approved stories. While the ingenuity and resilience that has long characterized Chinese independent documentary is still evident in individual efforts and evolutions of thought about independent media making, pressure to suppress non-state filmmaking has created an anxious and inhospitable environment for independent documentary in China.

Losing a Community and Archive

Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, the independent documentary communities in Kunming and Beijing sustained a tense equilibrium with state attention. This era represented a gray area of inconsistently-enforced restrictions on independent artists that allowed filmmakers to develop outsider filmmaking practices and engage with a tight community of collaborators, critics, and variously open-minded artists. Harassment of festivals and cancelled screenings became more common in 2013 and finally in 2014, the Beijing Independent Film Festival was forcibly shut down, and archives from the affiliated Li Xianting Film School were seized. The community lost its base; and hope for an equipoise with state power that would allow future documentary production all but disappeared.

Following the dissolution of this community and distribution framework, documentary filmmakers faced a narrow range of choices. Quoting producer and curator Zhang Xianmin, Robinson outlined the three choices most independent filmmakers were forced to make to survive: “go to the countryside, cooperate with the state, or move overseas.” Some filmmakers have remained in China and continue to make independent films and teach – Wu Wenguang’s Documentary Memory Project at Caochangdi Workstation, which allows young filmmakers to engage with family history, memory, and self-identity through non-fiction media, is still operating, albeit in a new location – but many filmmakers unwilling or unable to cooperate with the state have gone into some form of self-exile. While these choices have allowed some filmmakers to continue to work in a compromised capacity, “Independent communities cannot exist anymore,” Zhu said at USC, “there are individual efforts to make films now, but we are at the darkest point.”

The dismantling of these community centers has created a global diaspora of documentary filmmakers, and also made precarious the fate of these filmmakers’ archives. Michael Berry pointed out that the transition from DVD to streaming culture has strangled distribution of independent films within China, making it easier for censors to chase illegal or “underground” films online. “There’s no freedom in cultural spaces,” Berry added. The control and censure of this “alternative archive” is dully troubling to Zhu as he looks to the future of Chinese independent filmmaking. “The new generations won’t have any exposure to independent films,” Zhu said, “it just won’t exist for them, so they won’t know there is another way to make films. It’s kind of like how people in Beijing no longer know that the sky is actually supposed to be blue.”

“The new generations won’t have any exposure to independent films…it just won’t exist for them, so they won’t know there is another way to make films. It’s kind of like how people in Beijing no longer know that the sky is actually supposed to be blue.”

Aesthetic Appropriation and the Evolution of “Indie” Film in China

While skies may be quite dark for independent documentary filmmakers, Chinese “indie” film on a commercial, global scale is having a moment in the sun. The panel attempted to reconcile what “independent film” means when indie darling Bi Gan’s “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” smashes box office records, and “indie”-branded documentaries such as Jian Fan’s “Still Tomorrow” and Guo Ke’s “Twenty-Two” find mainstream success through state cooperation. These films may bear the aesthetic hallmarks of Chinese independent documentaries, but are among the few films that manage to emerge from China’s increasingly opaque censorship process. “[These films] put a gritty wrapping on pro-state storylines,” Berry explained.

While some find the artistic diversification of mainstream Chinese cinema to be a positive step towards an increasingly sophisticated global cinema, Zhu sees these films as a commercial co-opting of the “indie spirit.” Other attempts to commercialize – or possibly evolve – this “indie spirit” may be evident in new film festivals that have emerged in Hangzhou and Pingyao, Shanxi Province. While the Westlake International Documentary Festival and Pingyao International Film Festival, founded by director Jia Zhangke, don’t exactly claim to be filling the vacuum left by the closing of the Beijing Independent Film Festival and Yunfest in Kunming, unpublicized screenings and guest programmers at these festivals – as well as the Sichuan Women’s Film Festival and smaller screening series around major cities – create spaces for independent and experimental films. Indeed, there be some hope in the fact that these festivals are young and there remains an open question of what kinds of filmmakers – and narratives – they will serve in the long run.

Redefining Documentary and Swinging for the Fences

Models of viable nonfiction filmmaking in China have narrowed, but Jenny Chio suggested that reframing “documentary” as “non-state media making” creates space for consideration of other forms of state-defiant or state-agnostic media creation in China. Outside of formal documentary or journalistic practice are an army of amateur media-makers, often from rural or minority backgrounds, creating humorous or instructional videos, music videos featuring traditional songs, or documentation of religious festivals to serve their local communities. Chio spoke about Kuaishou, an app sometimes referred to “nongcun TikTok,” or “a window into rural China,” where video snapshots of rural life ranging from agrarian idyll to the truly absurd have captured the attention of Chinese and Western media. While these instances of “vernacular media” don’t necessarily share the goals of independent documentaries, these videos represent a platform for marginalized voices in China, a localized form of expression that exists outside a state-directed framing.

From the micro-filmmaking of rural communities to the maximalist efforts that have defined Chinese independent documentary’s greatest successes, Sabrina Qiong Yu points to filmmakers who have reacted to the restrictiveness of the artistic climate by swinging for the fences – creating vastly ambitious, formally complex, and stylistically daring work. Pointing to Zhao Liang’s “Behemoth” – a film as massively complex and dramatic as the damning message it carries about environmental devastation – Qiong Yu argued that byzantine censorship requirements have inspired filmmakers to make films that are harder to pin down; blending genres to confront formally the complexity of their subject matter, engage multiple ideas of reality, and ultimately offer a reconsideration of fact and fiction.

Following the panel, a passionate conversation occurred among the panelists and various champions of Chinese independent film in the audience. Many audience members discussed the pressure on international programmers to fight for Chinese films that may not ultimately be permitted to participate in their festivals. The losses suffered by the Chinese independent documentary community in recent years are profound, but this well-attended, extremely thoughtful panel was heartening in bringing together those who are working to protect and promote these films and filmmakers.

Thanks to Zhu Rikun, Luke Robinson, Michael Berry, Sabrina Qiong Yu, and Jenny Chio.

Wang Bing’s “Bitter Money”

Currently, OVID offers fifteen titles from the dGenerate catalog (See the full list below). From Wang Bing, master documentary filmmaker and acclaimed observer of some of China’s most traumatic periods, the site offers the film Bitter Money, in which Wang’s deceptively casual observation unravels a world of grim monotony for rural youth indentured to factory work. In Dead Souls, a trilogy of harrowing sweep and depth into historical trauma that Sight & Sound called “a monumental achievement,” Wang’s film gives voice to the survivors of reeducation camps that represent a particularly brutal period of the Community Party’s Anti-rightist campaign of 1957.

Two Chinese films about the environment are streaming on OVID – Jian Yi’s What’s For Dinner, which follows meat supply chains in China; and Wang Jiu-liang’s Beijing Beseiged by Waste, an astonishing exposé on the enormous, hidden piles of waste that surround China’s capital and play host to a distinct environmental and social system in crisis. Also streaming is Huang Weikai’s documentary collage Disorder, a black and white surrealist portrait of Guangzhou fraying at the edges, a society of watchers’ attention offset by frissons of chaos.

Pema Tseden’s “Tharlo”

As far as OVID’s narrative offerings, available to stream is Pema Tsenden’s tragi-comedy Tharlo, the story of a Tibetan sheep herder who goes to the city in want an identity card only to lose himself entirely. The Widowed Witch, Cai Chengjie’s deadpan-magical-realist-feminist fairy tale is streaming; as is Huang Ji’s Egg and Stone, a deeply personal film about the danger and discovery of a rural teenage girl’s sexual awakening.

OVID will continue to add additional titles over the coming months and years. “We’re going to keep adding films until we can’t add any more,” said Jonathan Miller, President of Icarus Films. “There needs to be a continuing space for independent, challenging films and we have to make it ourselves,” said Miller, who united several independent distributors to create a diverse and expanding catalogue of films on OVID. “We can’t keep relying on the big companies. We know there’s an audience for indie film across the country, so we have to bring our communities together to make this happen.”

The following dGenerate Films are available to stream on Ovid.tv: 

Before The Flood I and Before The Flood II – dir. Yan Yu and Li Yifan

Bitter Money – dir. Wang Bing 

Three Sisters – dir. Wang Bing

Dead Souls I, II, III – dir. Wang Bing

Ta’ang – dir. Wang Bing

‘Til Madness Do Us Part – dir. Wang Bing

Beijing Besieged by Waste – dir. Wang Jiu-liang 

Disorder – dir. Huang Weikai 

What’s for Dinner – dir. Jian Yi

The Widowed Witch – dir. Cai Chengjie

Egg and Stone – dir. Huang Ji

Tharlo – dir. Pema Tseden

The essay is printed below in its entirety. Many thanks to Professor Zimmerman for posting the essay!

“Reverberations and Amplifications”
by Karin Chien 

My Flaherty story really begins at the end of my first Flaherty seminar. But let’s start at the beginning.

In 2010, Dennis Lim curated a Flaherty Seminar on the theme of Work. He included films by Zhao Dayong, an indie filmmaker from mainland China. My company, dGenerate Films, distributes Dayong’s documentaries. We helped facilitate his visa to the US so he could attend.

Dayong returned filled with passion and joy about his Flaherty experience. His enthusiasm inspired us to think about mounting a Flaherty Seminar in China. Independent cinema was in a sense flourishing in mainland China at the time. Several independent Chinese film festivals were showcasing groundbreaking Chinese documentary work that would also premiere at Rotterdam, Venice, Cannes, Berlin. A Flaherty Seminar seemed an essential next step to further deepen documentary discourse in China.

Mary Kerr, then executive director of the Flaherty, and I started brainstorming. We talked about a smaller scale Flaherty seminar to test the waters, maybe a three-day event. Excited, we thought about how the Chinese public, the independent filmmaking milieu, and men and women in academic circles might accept a Flaherty-Seminar type event. We discussed whether we would allow international attendees or limit it to Chinese participants.

In 2011, I was invited to the Seminar as a Leo Dratfield Fellow, a special award to get a programmer and mid-career filmmaker to the event. This was my chance to see how the Seminar worked and to determine which elements of it we could feasibly bring to China.

I had another reason for attending. I wanted to meet the other Leo Dratfield Fellow, independent filmmaker Matthew Porterfield. Matt makes microbudget films set in Baltimore, his hometown, with non-professional actors. I had recently seen and loved Matt’s Putty Hill[2010]. I felt his work was reshaping American independent cinema.

When I arrived on the Colgate University campus on a summer day in 2011, I was reverberating with excitement and passion for cinema.

However, the Flaherty’s rigorous eating, screening, and discussion schedule soon caused me to fall behind in my producing and distributing work. Producers are essentially on call twenty-four seven. We spend our days negotiating and renegotiating deals, listening to grievances, resolving conflicts, hiring and firing. In the midst of this chaos, we offer creative feedback and guidance. Distribution, on the other hand, requires sustained attention to licensing agreements, marketing assets, bookings, DVD covers, and print traffic logistics.

I ran back and forth to my dorm room in between screenings and discussions, trying to keep up with the work. When Monday morning rolled around, emails, texts, and calls overwhelmed me. I walked around campus muttering, “Who has time to watch and discuss movies all day!” It felt like a faraway ideal I couldn’t reach. I gave up making time to eat.

By Day Three, I was exhausted and needed to return to reality. Former Flaherty executive director and Museum of Modern Art curator, Sally Berger and her partner offered me a seat back to Brooklyn in their car. In 2010, Sally and I had traveled to Beijing and Nanjing to visit China’s then thriving independent film scene. In 2013 at MoMA, Sally Berger curated a groundbreaking 25-year retrospective called “Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions,” co-curated by dGenerate Films programmer Kevin Lee. As I write this in 2018, the film festivals Sally and I attended have been shut down or forced out of the public sphere. Many of China’s best independent documentary makers, including Zhao Dayong, have left mainland China.

Though I left that first Seminar early, filled with guilt, it turned out that my Flaherty experience was just beginning; it would continue to reverberate.

Against the odds, in 2012, with the help of curator Ou Ning (Meishi Street [2006]) and leading Chinese independent film figure/curator/professor/producer Zhang Xianmin, plans for a mini-Flaherty in China started to come together.

But with the transfer of power to Xi Jinping, the environment in China had become more conservative. Mary Kerr and two Flaherty filmmakers, Ilisa Barbash and Laura Kissel, flew to China to present their work at the Bishan Harvest Festival in Anhui. When they landed in Shanghai, they learned that the authorities had shut down the festival.

However, private screenings continued, and Laura was also able to arrange university screenings in Hangzhou and Shanghai.

Later, during his first US visit, Zhang Xianmin presented a paper called “How to Kill a Festival” at New York University, which analyzed the death of independent film festivals in China, including plans for a Chinese Flaherty Seminar experience.

Nevertheless, the Flaherty experience continued to amplify. The films we had proposed for the Chinese Flaherty found their way to a new screening series, called ISAAS (Indie Screening Alliance of Art Spaces), curated by Zhang Xianmin. ISAAS and other screening series offered decentralized networks of alternative screening spaces in mainland China, providing a way for curators to screen films for localized audiences. Zhang Xianmin sent four Flaherty-selected titles to be included in this 2015 screening tour.

The Flaherty continues to reverberate for me. When I lived in Lisbon in 2016, I spent time with Nuno Lisboa, and guest taught in his film class at the Escola Superior de Artes e Design de Caldas da Rainha. Nuno curated the 2017 Flaherty, and runs Docs Kingdom in Portugal, another Flaherty-inspired global gathering.

Matt Porterfield and I have stayed in touch and are supporters of each other’s work. A few months ago, Matt asked me to mentor one of his promising film students in the Johns Hopkins University Film and Media Studies program.

Through these past ten years and the ongoing amplifications of my original, truncated Flaherty experience, my first impression of the Seminar hasn’t changed much. The Flaherty is both an imagined ideal and a real space. It’s where gathering together all day and all night to watch and discuss movies embodies not only a privilege, but a freedom worth fighting for.

Beginning October 19th, UCLA and affiliated venues around Los Angeles will host a series of premieres, special screenings, musical events, and a Jia Zhangke retrospective with screening dates through early December.

The screening series will open officially on October 19th at the Billy Wilder Theater, UCLA, Los Angeles with the West Coast premiere of Bi Gan‘s second feature – the follow-up to his celebrated debut Kaili Blues – A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Set again in Bi’s Guizhou hometown of Kaili, “the film’s title has nothing to do with Eugene O’Neill’s play, and everything to do with evoking the languorous slide of consciousness into twilight.”

Bi Gan’s “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (courtesy of COB)

Rounding out a broad-ranging showcase of contemporary Chinese cinema are Hu Bo‘s tragically poetic epic An Elephant Sitting Still; hutong auteur Yang Mingming‘s sassy debut feature Girls Always Happy; Cai Chengjie‘s witchy feminist folk tale The Widowed Witch; A Family Tour, Ying Liang‘s semi-autobiographical tale of a poignant family reunion; and Wang Bing‘s Dead Souls, an exhaustive documentation of the brutal legacy of the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the 1950s.

A retrospective of the work of Jia Zhangke will include screenings of Xiao Wu, Platform, The World, Still Life, and finally the West Coast premiere of Jia’s newest film – Ash is Purest White – on November 10th at UCLA.

Zhao Tao in Jia Zhangke’s “Ash is Purest White” (Courtesy of COB)

The full program and calendar for the series can be found here.

Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s “San Yuan Li”
Still courtesy of dGF and Icarus Films

How did dGenerate Films come to be?

dGenerate Films founder and president Karin Chien recently published a short history of dGenerate Films in the inaugural issue of Perfect Strangers magazine – a publication dedicated to cross-cultural reflections and exchanges that answer the question “how does the world meet itself?”

The article traces the dGenerate story from the serendipitous invitation to a screening of Ou Ning and Cao Fei’s “breathtaking” and brilliantly experimental documentary San Yuan Li that led to a journey to the largely-unsung corners of Chinese cinema culture, and an exploration of Chinese-American identity. From the early days of haphazard screenings and border crossings between China and the US laden with bags of screeners, to the challenges of finding a new audience for a remarkable generation of bold Chinese filmmakers, to dGenerate’s partnership with Icarus Films, Karin Chien’s story of dGenerate Films is a personal odyssey about the joys and struggles of developing a new relationship to China, and to cultivating a new, shared cinematic language.
The full article can be read here.

Thanks to Perfect Strangers magazine for helping tell the dGenerate Films story!

by Maya Rudolph

The Widowed Witch (Xiao Gua Fu Cheng Xian Ji) is the debut film by Cai Chengjie and was awarded the Hivos Tiger Award at the 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam. This review contains spoilers. 

The Widowed Witch is a film that establishes residence in its heroine’s body early on. Like the titular Widowed Witch, Er Hao, the film makes its way in the world with a distant, mordant eye on the symbols and illusions of witchcraft and Shamanism. Like Er Hao, the film is a sly manipulator up against the rules of village life. And like Er Hao, Cai Chengjie’s deadpan fairy tale takes on the contradictions of superstition and the furious chimera of women’s power to conjure an intriguing, misshapen magic.

Er Hao’s journey begins in a snowy hallucination, a winter’s tale of parabolic gestures and pale light. A woman tells a tragic story and wakes up far away; the world is in black and white and she has just been brought back to life. As Er Hao (Tian Tian) comes to, we see though her eyes her relatives’ home in a snowy Hebei village, a reverse Oz. Paralyzed and unable to speak, Er Hao learns that her family’s fireworks factory has exploded and though she has been miraculously restored by a local Shaman, her husband – a man with “humble eyebrows and shining eyes” – is dead. After she is raped by her uncle, a scene that plays out from an unendurably close point-of-view, Er Hao is gone. She reclaims her camper van from a hapless neighbor and takes off across a cluster of villages, out of options and on the road to nowhere.

From here, the camera exits the immediacy of Er Hao’s body. Small figures and cars move at long range across a colorless landscape of snow and sky fine as ink on paper. Cai plays heavily with the elements throughout the film, tokens of magic and deep winter drawn out in smoke and mirrors, fire and ice, the alchemies of temperature and earth. Er Hao is often hidden behind steam or through glass as she searches for a warm place to sleep, and fends off a series of terrible men. Some men, like the village mayor, are predatory; some are little boys playing with dynamite; another, the old soothsayer and invalid Long Siye, is just extremely smelly. Er Hao keeps moving, cutting an elegant figure among the dry cornstalks and too much snow. She’s deft when the village mayor hits on her, “I’ve been married three times and all the men died,” she tells him, “If you don’t want to get reelected next year, let’s go for it.” She makes Long Siye take a bath in the freezing courtyard. Er Hao is scorched as a “cursed women” by the village wives. She’s surrounded by explosive materials.

The Widowed Witch (courtesy of Icarus Films)

Er Hao’s fortunes take a turn when Long Siye’s bath seems to have restored his ability to walk and in a tribunal of oafish superstition, the town men decide that Er Hao is definitely a witch. In an orchestration that plays as a candlelight ritual, Er Hao is silhouetted, flanked on either side by the village men. Er Hao’s power is sure to be a powder keg of controversy, the men agree, scrambling to solve her problems as fast as they can create them. When electric lights switch on abruptly (“the power’s back on!”) in a moment of blisteringly funny disenchantment, the candles are unceremoniously blown out and the men leave her alone on her alter. Er Hao has no choice but to accept that she is a witch.

Back on the road, Er Hao moves with new resolve to find a place to live. She and her confidante, Shitou – her brother-in-law, a sweet, mute boy of about twelve – camp in their van, rootless outside the village perimeter. Er Hao meets Xu Wei, an old crush bubbling with entrepreneurial arrogance, and teases him about the angel wings sewn into his leather jacket, “Oh my god! It’s not enough to ride a motorcycle, you want to fly now?” She plucks a feather from his jacket, wistful. Later, she leaves him trapped inside a cupboard. She visits her second husband’s family and finds her sister-in-law pregnant with a baby she can’t afford, especially if it’s another girl. Er Hao tells the woman’s no-good husband that she will transform the baby into a boy if he follows her rules: he must treat his wife with great care and take over all the housework until the baby is born. Er Hao is summoned to exorcise the ghost of a little girl “left behind” by her parents. When she encounters the little girl in a field, she is unfazed, settling into her power. Er Hao’s gaze grows more direct, her plans sharper, her look wilder.

Cai builds Er Hao’s power though a magical illogic. Young woman and girls who bend Er Hao’s sense of justice are summoned in and out of air. Dead animals, half-miracles, and exploding apples unsettle the frozen ground. Though the film plays out largely in cropped black and white, hushes of color from embers and colored lights emerge in a few moments where Er Hao’s memories pour through the grayscale. Towards the end of her journey, Er Hao and Shitou post up like outlaws with string lights standing guard around their camper van. Her face glows like the snow.

The Widowed Witch (courtesy of Icarus Films

Cai’s filmmaking presents a vivid collision of darkly absurd fairy tale tropes and a posture of Western ranginess, a framing that underscores the bitter reality of Er Hao’s community. For a woman with few economic options taking a lifetime of loss in stride, being cast as a witch isn’t necessarily divination – it’s a job. Still, in scenes that lay bare the tragedy of rural poverty and domestic violence, Er Hao’s power is her righteousness, her ability to make her own rules and divine intervention as a kind of Shaman-cum-social worker. Er Hao’s steers superstitions into small subversions, proving that to survive as a women is a kind of magic.

During Chinese New Year, a calamitous sonic wall of unsettles spirits and fireworks closes in around Er Hao’s final days as a wandering witch. Er Hao crosses through gateways of life and death, overwhelmed; and speaks of herself drawing closer to becoming a village ghost. When she refuses to bless Xu Wei’s ill-fated mining operation, Er Hao is banished by the village men, who exterminate her power by dousing her in the “urine of hundreds of families.” Er Hao loses everything. Broken and banished by the people who demanded her power, she leaves behind two final acts – one of revenge and one of hope – and departs a frozen world. She is cursed, she is free, and of course she’s doomed. A witch can’t win because a witch doesn’t play by the rules. Er Hao disappears from the earth as a plume of smoke to the sky, unknowable through the upside-down gaze of those still left inside their bodies.

Zhang Mengqi’s “Self-Portrait: Birth at 47KM”

Borne out of the 2015-16 Cinema on the Edge screening series co-organized by dGenerate Films, the series “China Now: Not For Commercial Use” sought a rare opportunity to showcase four often difficult, sometimes experimental, boldly independent Chinese films. As curator Shelly Kraicer wrote of the program “China Now: Not For Commercial Use”, “Chinese films of ‘no commercial value’, like the four we are featuring in this little sidebar, help complement a fuller, richer picture of what Chinese filmmakers are capable of. And they give us, in the West, a richer view of the fabulous energy, creativity, and innovation that’s still pulsing through the Chinese cinema world.”

“China Now” featured films exclusively by women directors telling the stories of China’s women and girls. In the documentary Self-Portrait: Birth in 47km by Zhang Mengqi, the seventh in a series of “self-portraits” Zhang has completed since 2010 as part of the Wu Wengguang-mentored Caochangdi Workstation Folk Memory Project, Zhang returns again to her rural Hubei hometown village to capture the oral histories of survivors of the Great Famine of 1959-1961. Self-Portrait: Birth in 47km, which made its US premiere at the 2018 True/False Film Festival, is a deeply personal investigation into the labor that extends far beyond the trauma of childbirth and the enduring pain of generations of women still hollowed by memories of famine and the brutish indifference of history. The program featured the latest narrative feature by director Huang Ji (Egg and Stone). The 2017 coming-of-age narrative Foolish Bird tells the story of sideways survival and dead-ends as two teenage girls “left behind” try to forge a future in a Zhuhai village. Finally, the narrative short film Canton Novelty by Fang Lu and Xiao Yu‘s experimental short 25, brought audiences closer to the lives of young Chinese women coping with friendship, illness, and the uncertain future. Speaking to the decision to program a full slate of works by female filmmakers, Kraicer wrote,”For this spotlight on Chinese non-commercial cinema, why not show women holding up not just half, but the entire cinematic sky? Amidst the continuing impressive creative activity of Chinese art/indie/non-commercial filmmakers, it’s arguable that films by women have been in the vanguard in the past few years.”

Huang Ji’s “Foolish Bird”

dGenerate Film’s Karin Chien chatted with Shelly Kraicer about the challenges of introducing independent films to a devoted genre audience, and the gradual shift of genre films from “midnight” sidebars to mainstream festival fare.

—

Karin Chien: This is the third year you’ve programmed a sidebar program for the Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy. Can you talk about the films you chose for “China Now: Not For Commercial Use”? Why these films, for example, what drew you as a curator to these films?

Shelly Kraicer: This year, we followed the “sampler” model for “China Now: Not For Commercial Use” that the Far East Film Festival head Sabrina Baracetti originally suggested when I started in 2016. She wanted me to bring a small, carefully chosen, representative selection of recent Chinese independent films to Udine to feature them in a sidebar, for Udine FEFF audiences who are genre film devotees but may also be interested in Chinese indies, or for hard core “Asian genre film” fans who just feel like taking advantage of the increasingly broad palette of films FEFF has been featuring in recent years, and would like to try experimenting with a bit of the independent Chinese cinema space. As a “sampler”, we thought I should model the selection on a kind of menu approach, to represent different kinds of Chinese independent film work. So, I offer one fiction feature, one documentary feature, one live action short, and one experimental short. Huang Ji’s Foolish Bird is an outstanding fiction film from China that, after its premiere at the Berlinale last year, was temporarily not available for screenings, due to a complicated situation securing the necessary authorization to be screened abroad and at home. That situation was resolved enough to let us show it, and I was thrilled that we could bring her intensely personal voice and brave, vital commitment to socially engaged story telling to Udine.

Zhang Mengqi’s brilliant documentary Self-Portrait: Birth at 47KM grows out of vitally important Caochangdi Workstation Folk Memory Project. But Zhang brings her own control of image design, a really fundamental commitment to beautiful cinematography as well as honest realistic documentary filmmaking to all her work, and especially this one. So it’s a natural choice to bring her voice, and that of the FMP to Far East Film Festival audiences.

Canton Novelty is an extraordinary short narrative fantasy film from an artist Fang Lu whose works have only shown in galleries before, but this story of three women dissolving and re-creating nighttime Guangzhou with their magic iPhones is subversive, funny, and very accessible. Finally, Xiao Yao’s experimental short piece 25 won the best experimental film prize at the China Independent Film Festival in 2016, and brings semi-abstract images together with a searingly emotional theme of inter-generational mourning. Four utterly different films by for independent Chinese women artist/filmmakers I think makes at the same time a very provocative and attractive package to present at the Far East Film Festival.

KC: At a film festival celebrating genre filmmaking, can you talk about this special sidebar of films “not for commercial use?” How did it come to be? Are there other festivals or venues where can we find this kind of cinema from mainland China?

SK: It’s interesting to find this kind of sidebar at Udine, which was founded and original designed to be a platform for the kinds of commercial and genre films from East Asian countries that didn’t used to find places in international film festivals, 20 years ago and more. The landscape of festivals’ selections, and in particular the major “art film” festivals’ attitudes towards genre cinema from Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan in particular has undergone a significant change since then. First in “midnight extreme” sidebars (not without a certain unfortunate aroma of exorcized orientalizing ghettoization) these kind of films started infiltrating Toronto, Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. And then migrated to the “main selections” and competitions of these festivals, as fences these gatekeeping festivals had erected around films from these countries became gradually more permeable.

And, I think in response to these changes in the festival landscape, the Udine Far East Film Festival also sought ways to broaden their programming, finding space for documentaries, more research-oriented retrospectives of arthouse and commercial directors, and the like. In this context, it seemed natural that Sabrina Baracetti and Thomas Bertache were also willing to make room for me to offer them a small sidebar of Chinese indies. I had worked for several years previously at FEFF as one of their consultants for China, while I lived in Beijing. And Thomas and Sabrina were both very interested in the work I did as part of Cinema On The Edge, with you Karin and J.P. Sniadecki, arranging a substantial screening series in 2015-2016 of recent Chinese cinema in New York and then touring it to many cities around the world. So it was a very happy circumstance that brought me back to FEFF as a curator of this “non-commercial” cinema sidebar, and I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to offer it to Far East audiences for the past three years.

Locarno in Los Angeles,

Maya Rudolph/dGF: Hi there! This year marked the second edition of LA in Locarno. I’m curious to know how your approach to selecting films from Locarno to bring to LA was impacted by the first edition of the festival?

Robert Koehler:  We used the first year’s program as a basic model to follow for the second (and I suspect that’ll the case moving forward). The concept remained the same: A curated selection from the competitive sections of movies that hadn’t previously shown in Los Angeles. That curation would be the best of the work, in our judgment, from the field. Because Locarno’s programming is already notably progressive, deeply artistic and vigorously international, our selection would reflect that precise programmatic philosophy. Underlying all of that is a brazen embrace of radical cinema that offered up new possibilities for the art form, which is the foundational principle of Locarno and why we wanted to bring a portion of this particular festival to Los Angeles in the first place.

dGF: How do you curate for LA versus another city?

RK: For sure, you can program for Los Angeles with no sense of holding back, or of needing to curb your desire for the most adventurous and challenging, and wide-ranging, program possible. In this way, Los Angeles ranks with the best cinephile cities anywhere–I’m thinking Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, maybe Hong Kong, Berlin–for having the kind of audience that wants to explore cinema’s range of possibilities. The audience in the city wants to be taken on an adventure, they yearn for it, and I think that they now expect it from Locarno in Los Angeles–now that they’ve experienced for two cycles.

dGF: Locarno in LA was held at Downtown Independent in Downtown LA. There’s been a lot of recent talk of LA film culture shifting in terms of both appetite for international cinema in LA and the geography of screening venues. Do you see the culture for international cinema or approach to film festivals changing in LA?

RK: Possibly, although since it always seems to be shifting–like the city itself–it’s hard to tell. Downtown has changed so dramatically in the last fifteen years that it’s hard to recognize parts of it, like the ever-expanding Arts District. The loss of a venue and gathering place like Cinefamily didn’t actually result in a void; instead, it fostered all sorts of micro-micro-cinemas around town organized by ex-Cinefamily employees. The Los Angeles Film Festival, which had severely declined since the time when Rachel Rosen was artistic director, has shifted its spot on the calendar to the fall festival season, and this caused more than a few raised eyebrows; but with its new leadership, it actually may be going in interesting directions. We’ll see there. AFI Fest remains steady and reliable in November in the heart of Hollywood; the only desire there is that it could run a full ten days, since it could then accommodate more of its pretty sharp festival-of-festivals focus.

Xu Bing’s “Dragonfly Eyes”

dGF: I’d love to hear about the curation of the two films from China at LA in Locarno – Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes and Wang Bing’s Mrs. Fang. The films screened back-to-back on one day of the festival and I was really struck seeing Dragonfly Eyes, which is such an eerily impersonal film, right before Mrs. Fang, which is so personal on a number of levels. I’m curious to know you see these two films to be in conversation with each other and how they ended up where they did in the screenings.

RK: For sure, the scheduling there was deliberate. That’s an interesting way to look at those two movies against each other. I came at them as one who worked in the PRC for a couple of years and watched the horrible Xi regime carve out and oppress the enthusiastic culture of doggedly independent filmmakers working all over Mainland China. The regime hasn’t succeeded in eradicating this radical culture, but the ability for artists to operate openly and freely under such police-state conditions is really difficult and even frightening–as a few young filmmakers told me one day in a Beijing Hutong-turned-record store, where they were gathered with Rotterdam’s great programmer Gerwin Tamsma. Xu’s and Wang’s movies represented for me two of several tendencies in current independent Chinese cinema, and their selection in last year’s Locarno made it possible to present them in the form of an exposition. By the way, that’s how I view Locarno in Los Angeles: As an exposition of cinema. This was the notion of the city’s first great festival, and it was in its name: The Los Angeles International Film Exposition, or Filmex. I’ve never understood why the term “exposition” kind of fell out of favor, but to me it more accurately describes what this kind of presentation is all about, a much better term than “festival.”

dGF: Locarno has been a champion of Chinese cinema for many years. With Dragonfly Eyes and Mrs. Fang, the dynamism of Chinese cinema makes a really strong showing in this selection of films. Over the years, what’s changed about the role (and perception) of Chinese films and filmmakers at Locarno?

RK: No other festival in the West has shown Chinese cinema for as many years as Locarno–over sixty years! Think of that. The 1950s, supposedly a “dead zone” for the country’s cinema (as it’s taught in the West, but not when you study matters inside the PRC!). I remember when Li Hongqi brought his amazing Winter Vacation to Locarno, and I thought at the time that here was a true discovery on the highest level, a young filmmaker of astounding imagination and wit exploding onto the world stage with as good a movie as anything made in the past decade (at least). But because of the nature of festivals, it was this particular movie, not a movie representing or a part of a greater “movement” or “school.” Li, whose subsequent career is becoming a total mystery to me and emblematic of a lot that’s troubling about PRC cinema culture, is never going to be part of anybody’s “movement” anyway; he’s his own guy, completely distinct and maverick, like Ju Anqi.

dGF: What’s next for Locarno in LA?

RK: Year three. We’re planning to stay downtown, which continues to be under-served as a cinema-going neighborhood in Los Angeles–and that’s about the most ridiculous fact right now about being a Los Angeles cinephile. Locarno 51 this August will tell us what to program. Simple as that.

Thank you, Robert! 

Visit the dGenerate Films collection on the Icarus Films website where you can browse by narratives or documentaries.

Huang Ji’s 2012 debut feature, Egg and Stone, shows the world of rural Chinese life through a perspective seldom seen, that of a young girl “left behind” in the reluctant care of her aunt and uncle in a small Hunan village. Huang’s 14-year-old heroine struggles with the sharp pain of her early sexual discoveries, compounded by the casual horror of abuse at the hands of her uncle.

An exhumation of her own past traumas and revelations, Egg and Stone was shot in Huang’s own hometown village with a cast of non-actors. Awarded the Tiger Award for Best Feature Film at the 2012 Rotterdam Film Festival, Egg and Stone (trailer can been seen here) has been lauded for its striking, clear-eyed photography and unflinching storytelling, laying bare the private tragedy of  a girl displaced from her own home and body. dGenerate Films and Icarus Films are proud to now include Egg and Stone in our catalogue of bold independent films from China.

In her follow up feature, The Foolish Bird (Ben Niao), which recently premiered at the 2017 Berlinale, Huang again explores  the phenomenon of young people in rural villages “left behind” by their parents seeking economic opportunity in big cities,  and the ruptures in their private lives and personal security that these adolescents must navigate on their own. As in Egg and Stone, a restlessness and grasping for love and stability drive Huang’s characters to move through an unstable world, creating new narratives of China’s rural woman and girls and painting The Foolish Bird as an emotional and thematic companion piece to Egg and Stone.

Speaking with V Cinema, Huang said of her new film, “The film is not a sequel to Egg and Stone per se, though [cinematographer and Huang’s husband Ryuji] Ozuka and I took to filming it again in my hometown, and used the same non-professional cast we worked with in the earlier film.”

Following the world premiere of The Foolish Bird in Berlin where the film received a Special Mention from the Jury, Huang has been profiled by V Cinema, and reviewed by the Goethe Institute and Sino Cinema.