Event Date and Time:
October 17, 2008 – October 18, 2008
Friday 1:00-7:00, Saturday 10:00a - 6:00
Location:
Department of Cinema Studies - Room 648
721 Broadway, 6th Floor
New York, NY 10003
The 4th Documentary Biennial
October 17-18, 24-25
New York University, Department of Cinema Studies
721 Broadway, Room 648
All events are open to the public and free of charge.
The Reel China Documentary Festival is an independent film festival that presents the most outstanding contemporary documentaries produced in China. Participating filmmakers range from more experienced professional documentarians to young novices. As their disparate visions extend and overlap, we witness the persistent presence of independent cameras that, amidst the disorienting transformation in China, assures the discovery and documentation of fragments of contemporary reality that are becoming history at breakneck speed.
-Co-presented by the Center for Religion and Media, the Department of Cinema Studies, and REC Foundation NY.
-Co-sponsored by the Center for Media, Culture and History, the Department of East Asian Studies, China House, and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, with the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University.
-Curated by Angela Zito (NYU) and Zhang Zhen (NYU), with Michael Pingjie Zhang (REC Foundation).
-Event staff support: Laura Terruso, Jeff Richardson, Catherine Holter, Ventura Castro and Liza Greenfield.
-Thanks to: Richard Allen, Faye Ginsburg, and Barbara Abrash.
Schedule of Events
*****
Friday Oct 17
Opening Program
1:00 pm
Welcome by Faye Ginsburg and Angela Zito
1:15 pm
Introduction by Zhang Zhen
Bing Ai
Dir. FENG Yan, 2007 114 min. English Subtitles
With the completion of the Three Gorges Dam, 1.13 million people along the Yangtze River will have been dislocated. The majority of them are farmers. BING AI features one woman farmer who refuses to move away from her village. The film follows her seven-year struggle with officials who pressure her to relocate, while a strong devotion to her land compels her to remain in the place she calls home.
3:30 - 4:00 pm
Q & A with scholar and critic CUI Weiping
4:00 – 6:00 pm
Roundtable on Documentary in China Today with Jonathan Kahana (Cinema Studies), LU Xinyu (Fudan University, Shanghai), Angela Zito (CRM), moderated by Zhang Zhen (Cinema Studies), joined by several visiting filmmakers.
6:00 pm
Opening Reception
*****
Saturday Oct 18
Program II
10:00 am
Introduction by Angela Zito
Growing Up (Chengzhang)
Dir. LI Youjie, 2007 11 min. English subtitles
This witty short allows elementary, middle and high school students to share their dreams with the camera. The director describes the “hatching” process of schooling thus: “When I was small, I watched chicks hatching, excited to see tiny lives, to see them grow up slowly, mature and come into themselves. When did I myself hatch? Or, I might ask, how will I hatch someday?”
We Are the Children of Communism (Women shi gongchan zhuyi shengluehao)
Dir. CUI Zi’en, 2007 94 min. English Subtitles
The Yuanhai Migrants Children’s School closes for unknown reasons. The students manage to continue class first in a ruined factory and in the street. Then, even these makeshift classrooms disappear. In one semester, attendance drops from 720 to 16 as they learn in a minibus and in a teacher’s tiny home. Intimately shot, the film reflects the pressures that new city migrants face, and illuminates the children’s struggle.
Noon-12:30 pm
Q & A with filmmaker CUI Zi’en
12:30-1:30 pm
BREAK FOR LUNCH
Program III
1:30 pm
My Dear (Qin ai de)
Dir. GU Yaping, 2007 82 min. English Subtitles
The film records its maker’s search for herself through her relationships with several other similar urban women artists--their struggles in and out of marriage, their confusion in the face of conflicts between their ideals and realities, as well as their tense friendships which go through moments of mutual caring, understanding and discord.
3:00-3:30 pm
Q & A with filmmaker GU Yaping
3:30-3:45 pm
BREAK
3:45 pm
Though I Am Gone (Wo sui si qu)
Dir. HU Jie, 2007 68 min. English Subtitles
In August 1966, the Red Guards’ violent phase of 'The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ spread from the educational sector to all other social circles. Within this month of ‘Red August’, Beijing alone saw 1,774 people killed. Bian Zhongyun, Vice Principal of the prestigious Beijing Normal University Girls Secondary School, was the first victim beaten to death during this month of terror. The film draws upon photographs of Bian's death taken by her husband, Wang Jingyao, eyewitness accounts from courageous interviewees and broadcast footage from the period.
5:00 - 6:00 pm
Roundtable with filmmaker HU Jie, joined by ZHU Rikun (curator and critic) and Rebecca Karl (EAS/History)
*****
Friday Oct 24
Program IV
10:00 am
Introduction by Angela Zito
Have Meal When You Have To (Gai chifan, chifan)
Dir. GAO Yanfei & WU Yifei, 2007, 69 min. English Subtitles
In Lianzhuang, a community in the southern city of Hangzhou, there are two distinct groups of people: students who come from all over the country to take prep classes in art for the art-major of the National College Entrance Examination and those who service them. This other group includes elderly people who equally come from all kinds of regions and backgrounds and who work as models for the students.
11:15 am
That Winter, This Summer (Nanian dongitan, jinnian xiatian)
Dir. YANG Huazhou, 2007, 88 min. English Subtitles
Wang Anjiang—an ethnic Miao peasant—beggared himself and his family collecting ancient Miao folksongs. During that 34-year period, his wife died because they had no money for her treatment, and his eldest son poisoned himself to death because they could not afford his tuition. Everyone blames Wang but he persists, finally managing to collect twelve volumes of folk songs ranging from “Nüwa mending the fallen sky” to those about everyday lives of the Miao people. He wants to publish these collections. After a heavy snow, the old man becomes sick. Three years later, his younger son has a family of his own and drinks less, his grandson can now walk, and Wang is even older and quieter. But he keeps repeating: “I must think of a way to publish the book…” In the end, father and son carry the folk song collection to a prospective publishing company in the city.
Program V
1:45 pm
Wuding River (Wu Ding He)
Dir. LI Xiaofeng & JIA Kai, 2007 103 min. English Subtitles
In northern Shann'xi province, the poorest region in China, many tricycle drivers left their farmland to make a living in the small city. They pin all hopes on their kids, believing their lives will change when the kids enter university. In one family, four years pass and the eldest child finally graduates, only to find there's no job waiting for her. But the family has already begun another round of battle for college competition. Instinctively, like hens, the whole family turns energy toward hatching another new hope: the younger child.
3:30 pm
Golden Lotus—The Legacy of Bound Feet (Zhong Guo Jin Lian)
Dir. Joanne Cheng, 2006 59 min. English Subtitles
The filmmaker searches the banks of the northern Yellow River and in remote villages in southwest Yunnan for the last women with bound feet, China's thousand year-old tradition of erotic beauty, mutilation and female survival. Told through the first-person narrative of the filmmaker, who was raised by her bound-foot grandmother, the film captures otherwise lost voices and the haunting memories of twelve bound-feet Chinese women aged 78 to 106, including that of the 90 year-old paper cut folk artist, Yang Huixiu. Their combination of strength and delicacy raises questions about the status of women in societies once, and still, dominated by men.
Special Feature
7:00 pm
Introduction by Zhang Zhen
Taishi Village (Taishi Cun)
Dir. AI Xiaoming, 2005 120 min. English Subtitles
Shot over twenty days in the autumn of 2005, AI Xiaoming’s film follows the escalating violence surrounding a political dispute over an election in a village in Guangzhou. Disgusted at the corruption shown by local officials in one land theft after another, the population and its government finally deadlocked over the contested recall—and we are left wondering just who are the people threatening, and in some cases literally attacking, the village organizers and their lawyers.
*****
Saturday Oct 25
Program VI
10:00 am
Introduction by Zhang Zhen
The Road (Lu)
Dir. JIA Ding, 2006 56 min. English Subtitles
Hou-yin-dou Village is located in Mizhi County, Shaanxi Province in the middle of the Loess Plateau of central China. A new road is desperately needed to improve the living and economic conditions of the villagers. Ms. Ji Qiaoling, a poverty alleviation official sent from the county government, starts fund-raising. She tries everything: pooling funds from local villagers, applying for support at the unresponsive county bureau of transportation, and finally turning to ask a local “big bill” (da kuan)—an illiterate rich mine-owner originally from the village. The rich guy does not give a clear answer. Ji Qiaoling and her fellow officials decide to host a theatrical performance in the village and invite the mine-owner back to his hometown. The performance starts, the rich guy is back, the banquet is on, and Ji is already slightly drunk, yet the “big bill” still holds back his promise…
11:00 am
Torch Troupes (Huo Ba Ju Tuan)
Dir. XU Xin, 2006 110 min. English Subtitles
“Torch Troupes” got their name during the Cultural Revolution, when traditional Sichuan Opera was prohibited in public and troupes could only tour remote rural areas, performing underground at night by torchlight. In 2001, six national Sichuan Opera companies were integrated into one that rarely performs. Today, the informal show troupes created by Sichuan Opera actors dismissed by national companies in the 1990s have become the new struggling “torch troupes.” Three or four of them continue to perform in tea-houses scattered in the old neighborhoods of Chengdu. With the ageing audience and teahouse venues disappearing, some actors switch to “dance shows” or turn to running small businesses. Li Baoting, a master of Sichuan opera, began his career at eight but now mingles with showgirls in popular and cheap bars. On the other hand, actor Wang Bin refuses to give up, going on with his troupe in a temporary tent in this big city where everybody seems to be in a rush.
Program VII
1:45 pm
Introduction by Richard Allen and Angela Zito
Faith (Xin Xin)
Dir. WEI Xueqi, 2008 98 min. English Subtitles
Director Bai is the person-in-charge of the local church. There are five services in Yiminhe but only one is legal. Every day, Director Bai has to rush to different services, so she wants to build a big church to hold them all. After two years of effort, approval is secured. The documentary begins as construction commences, with insufficient funds raised by local Christians. Eventually costing over one million RMB, the construction has trapped Director Bai in a web of huge debt. The contractor refuses to hand over the church, Bai continues to fund-raise, and the Christians still use their original venues.
3:30 pm
Idle People in Society (Xianzhe)
Dir. ZHANG Weijie, 2006 79 min. English Subtitles
This documentary presents the life of four street performing singers from various walks of life: Old Fang, an unemployed worker; Old Zhao, an unemployed migrant peasant worker; Shi Jing, a widow from Shandong Province; and Little Ding, another unemployed man who tries to support his child in college. They work hard, but without acknowledgement from family members and society. Amidst challenges and setbacks, they use singing in the streets to seek dignity, explain history and reality, vent their happiness and sadness, and pray for a better tomorrow.
4:50 - 5:50 pm
Round Table with HAO Jian (scholar and critic), CUI Weiping (Scholar and critic), and Xudong Zhang (EAS), moderated by Angela Zito.
6:00 - 7:00 pm
Closing reception
REEL CHINA at NYU participants
AI Xiaoming (filmmaker, scholar)
Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Sun Yat-sen University, where she directs the Comparative Literature& World Literatures Section, program leader of the Sex/Gender Education Forum, translator and director of the Chinese performance based on The Vagina Monologues. She set up an independent digital video studio in 2004 which aimed at empowering marginalized groups by providing media training workshops. The programs made have been distributed to the universities and NGOs for supporting the curriculum of women’s and gender studies and advocacy for human rights. She has worked closely with filmmaker Hu Jie, and we are showing Taishi Village as a special feature on Friday evening, Oct. 24.
Documentaries jointly made by AI Xiaomig & HU Jie are :
1、2004 White Ribbon 《白丝带》
2、2004 The Vagina Monologues: A Chinese Version 《阴道独白·中文演出》
3、2004 The Making Of Vagina Monologues: Stories Behind Scene 《阴道独白·幕后故事》
4、2005-2007 Garden in Heaven 《天堂花园》1- 4
5、2005 Painting For The Revolution: Peasants Paintings from HU County 《为革命画画》
6、2005 Taishi Village 《太石村》1- 4
7、2006 Why You Take Up A Camera 《你拿摄影机干什么》
8、2006 Sex，Gender And Rights in Asia: The first International Conference of Asian Queer Studies 《性、性别与权利：亚洲首届酷儿研究大会》
9、2006 People’s Delegate YAO Lifa 《人民代表姚立法》
10、2006 The Central Plains 《中原纪事》
11、2006 Care and Love 《关爱之家》
12、2007 Red Art 《红色美术》
13, 2008 The Train to My Home Town
CUI Zi’en (filmmaker)
is a director, film scholar, novelist, movie critic, film screenplay writer, and film producer. He graduated from the Chinese Academy of Social Science with an MA in literature and is now associate researcher at the Film Research Institute of the Beijing Film Academy. In 2002, he received the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission’s Felipa Award for bringing issues of same-sex love into Chinese culture and public awareness, with a prolific crop of critically acclaimed articles, lectures, books, and films, including the first gay novel in modern China. Released in 1999, Men and Women (directed by Bingjian Liu), was the first Chinese film that depicted the daily life of gay people in China. Cui Zi’en wrote the script. “I wanted to show how we live day by day and to suggest that everyone can have a homosexual side,” he says.
He has made over 15 short and feature length documentary and feature films, that have been shown in festivals around the world, including Locarno, Hong Kong, London, Vancouver, Pusan.
For a scholarly essay, see Chris Berry http://positions.dukejournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/12/1/195
For an interview with Cui, see http://positions.dukejournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/12/1/181
For an example of Cui’s own popular writing about the gay community in China see http://www.iias.nl/nl/29/IIAS_NL29_13.pdf
CUI Weiping (scholar and critic)
graduated from Chinese Literature Department of Nanjing University with her BA in 1982 and her MA in 1984. She has been teaching literature at the Beijing Film Academy where she became Professor in the Dept. of Social Sciences in 1999. Her research interests include cultural criticism of movies; social and political criticism; translation and introduction of the ideologies and cultures of modern Eastern Europe. Her own writings include A Wounded Dawn 1999; The Sightless Sound 2000; Positive Life 2003; Before Justice 2005, Narratives of our times 2008, and translated The Spirit of Prague 1998; Collected Works of Vaclav Havel 2003.
FENG Yan (filmmaker, writer)
was born in 1962 in the city of Tianjin, China. She went to Japan in 1988 to study economics, where she was instead deeply inspired by the writings of renowned Japanese documentary maker Ogawa Shinsuke. After translating his Harvesting Films into Chinese she joined the free-lance journalist cooperative Asia Press International in 1994. Feng began making documentaries about rural China in 1994. Early work includes I Want to Go to School, Runaway People, and Village Submerged by Dam, Spring of Xiao Xiao, all broadcast on Japanese public television.
Dreams of Changjiang (1997), her first feature-length documentary won the Excellent Documentary Award at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival'98. Bingai (2007) won the Excellent Documentary Award in The 4th China Documentary Film Festival’2007, the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize and the Community Cinema Award at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2007, the Grand Prize oat Punto de Vista in Spain in 2008, the Humanitarian Award for Outstanding Documentary in the HK International Film Festival 2008. Her new work Women of the Yangzi River is in post-production. We are sorry she was unable to join us this fall.
GU Yaping (filmmaker)
an independent film director based in Beijing, received her BA from Wuhan University in Economic Management. She worked at the Shaanxi Television Station as a program director after graduation from 1997 to 2003. Her MA is from the Directing Department of the Beijing Film Academy in 2006. Since then she has made several documentaries for China Central Television on religion, arts and culture, and two short independent documentary films. My Dear is her first feature length doc, and has been shown at Oxdox International Doc Film Festival in the United Kingdom, as well as at China’s Yunnan Multi-cultual Visual Festival. In it, Gu uses film as a means for observing, experiencing and reflecting upon her own life and womanhood.
HAO Jian (scholar, filmmaker)
Received his BA in Chinese Literature, at Nanjing Normal University; his M.A. in Film Theory from the Beijing Film Academy where he is Professor in the Film Study Department. He has lectured and served on film juries around the world, from Taiwan to Brazil to the United States, directed and written award-winning film and TV screenplays, and is at work on a documentary about a Chinese intellectual’s life in the sixties. His latest book is: TV drama in China: Culture Study and Genre Study, from the China Film Publishing House, 2008
HU Jie
was born in 1958 and graduated from the Art College for the People's Liberation Army, where he majored in oil painting. In 1995, he began to make documentaries. His films include Yuanmingyuan Artist Village (1995), Remote Mountains (1995), The Female Matchmaker (1996), On the Seaside (1999–2003), Mountain Songs in The Plain (2001–2003), Looking for Lin Zhao's Soul (1999–2004), Bask in Sunshine (2002) and The Elected Village Chief (2000–2004). He also made a series of short films about migrant workers, including The Trash Collector (1998), The Janitors (1998), The Construction Workers (1998) and The Factory Set up by the Peasants (1998).
Hu Jie is committed to using documentary film as a means to challenge official Chinese historical narratives while providing visual details in order to, in Hu Jie's own words, “remember history.”
Interview with Hu http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/35/hu_jie_documentaries.html
Review of Although I am gone http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,483023,00.html
Jonathan Kahana (scholar, critic)
Jonathan Kahana is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University, where he is co-director of the graduate Certificate program in Culture and Media. He is the author of Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (Columbia UP, 2008), and of articles on documentary and avant-garde film, cultural theory, and American film and television history, published or forthcoming in Afterimage, Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Framework, Millennium Film Journal, and Social Text, as well as in Contemporary American Cinema (Open University Press, 2006) and The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road (U of Minnesota Press, 2007). His current projects include an international reader in documentary film history, and studies of sound media and forms of historical re-enactment in contemporary film, television, and art video.
Rebecca E. Karl (scholar)
teaches modern Chinese history at New York University. She is the author of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century_ (Duke 2002) as well as of the forthcoming Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World: A Concise History (Duke 2009). She is currently completing a manuscript entitled ”The Magic of Concepts: Philosophy and the Economic in Early and Late Twentieth Century China.”
LU Xinyu (scholar, critic)
received her PhD in Western Aesthetics from Fudan University, Shanghai where she now directs the Television Journalism Department in the School of Journalism. She is also Director of the Chinese Television Documentary Academic Association. In academic year 2008-09, she is visiting NYU Cinema Studies Department on a grant funded by the Asian Cultural Council. Chief among her many publications is the very important Documenting China: The Contemporary Documentary Movement in China in 2003.
See a review of that influential book by filmmaker Feng Yan (director of Bing Ai) at http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/23/box23-4-e.html
ZHANG Xudong (scholar, critic)
Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese and Chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at NYU. His books include Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and New Chinese Cinema; Whither China: Intellectual Politics of Contemporary China; Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century, all published by Duke University Press.
ZHANG Zhen (scholar, critic, curator)
is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her book-length publications in English include the award-winning An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937 (2005) and The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Century (2007), which she edited. She has also organized numerous Chinese film-related events, including the biennial Reel China Documentary Festival, at NYU as well as other public venues such as the Film Society at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Museum of Modern Art. Her creative work includes a collection of poetry, Mengzhong louge [Dream loft] (1997), and numerous other poems, experimental essays, and memoirs in a variety of journals and anthologies in several languages. Her current projects include a volume, Screening TransAsia: Genre, Stardom, and Intercultural Imaginaries (co-edited with Chris Berry), and a new book tentatively entitled, Celluloid Orphans and the Melodrama of Sinophone Film History, 1945-1973.
ZHU Rikun (curator, critic)
In 2001 he founded the independent production and distribution company Fanhall Films in Beijing, which he still heads today. In 2006 he became the Chief Executive Officer of the LI Xianting Film Foundation. Zhu has supervised the production or publication of some of the most important books ands films on independent cinema in China, as well as organized the China Documentary Film Festival, and the Beijing Independent Film Festival.
Angela Zito (scholar, curator),
co-curator of Reel China 08, teaches anthropology and religious studies at NYU where she is also co-founder and co-director of The Center for Religion and Media. She is interested in embodiment and performance as modes of cultural production. Current projects include a study on “Seeking significance: finding yourself in public in Beijing” on the performance of new senses of personhood in collective pursuits in public spaces and work on documentary film-making around issues of social justice in China.
Visit http://www.angelazito.com/ for her academic, art and film projects.
