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The 4th REEL CHINA Documentary Biennial has selected 33 films produced (including four docu-dramas) during the past several years. Participating filmmakers range from the more experienced professional documentarians to young novices from the so-called “post-1980” generation. 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.
Our 2008 Biennial collects documentaries on all kinds of subjects: the persistent memory of socialist past (San Li Dong; Though I Was Gone); religious life in rural China (Belief, Faith and Raised from Dust); sea change in geographic and cultural landscapes (The DreamFaramita and The Landscape), etc. A stage as compact as a small drugstore offers a window to how life is changed during a village political election. Among depictions of various social groups, we see women such as the modern entrepreneur Wenzi who has returned to Beijing from overseas and ventures in art business in face of challenges and frustrations on all sides (My Dear), and her rural counterpart Ji Qiaoling who as a village political head has to come up with all kinds of entrepreneur strategies in order to pool funding for the construction of a road leading to her much secluded village (The Road). Equally admirably, Bing’ai, as a devoted wife and mother in Sichuan Province, has to brace up for new challenges in life as her house is demolished in order to make space for the looming Three Gorges Dam (Bing Ai). Others might not be as resilient as these women. We see characters being wiped off the stage of life as they fail to catch up with the rhythm of the era’s leitmotif: change and transformation (Torch Troupe, An Zi, and Idle People in Society). Still others keep investing hope in their children (Wu Ding River). The nerve-racking competition and noise faced by an urban hospital stands in contrast with the quietness and crudity of a private clinic (Pediatric Department and Dr. Ma’s Country Clinic). Many non-Han Chinese are not spared from the brutal demands of change. For example, in Deer Raiser in Aoluguya, some Ewenkis in Northwest China—formerly deer raisers living in harmony with their woods and animals—feel totally disoriented by accelerated modern life. They resort to heavy drinking and return to the woods—now on the edge of the city and everything. Others manage to hold onto the last lingering traces of tradition and the past, not without a cost (Yin Ma Ferry, That Winter and This summer). What is more, the young post-1980 generation also starts confronting the grittier part of reality. They film their friends (The 29-years-old High School Student); they also follow and observe senior citizens whose life seems as rootless as their own (Have Meal When You Have To).
Everywhere in China change and transformation is being written. Familiar landscapes are disappearing everyday. People gain new kinds of opportunity and freedom in the process, but such new gains need to be offset by having to say adieux to what they were born with and roaming on unfamiliar territories, rootless. The documentarian’s camera tilts between tradition and change, between past and present. It not only charts the itinerary of new moves but also documents the persistence traces of tradition, memory, trauma, and children’s persistent hope for school (e.g. We Are the … of Communism).
These documentaries consist of collective scrolls as well as single sketches of contemporary Chinese life. Most importantly, while they vary from mature to tender, every documentary represents a unique perspective and vision. These works, although at times feeling like sketches rather than fully completed paintings, are the children of this fast changing era: as new situations keep coming up, reactions and sentiments do not yet have enough time to be fully sorted out and digested. Yet the urgency of documentation supersedes the time needed for their fuller development and settlement. We need to archive and document as much as possible this era that is constantly forming, changing and dissipating, and that will be replaced with the next layer of change within the twinkling of an eye. We need to keep a record of, within this split of a second, how Chinese have lived, endured, and hoped so that we as well as the generations to come will be able to see how life and hope has been sincerely strived for at this unusual moment in Chinese history.
Apart from all the moving image portraits of contemporary Chinese society we have currently collected, we need to admit that we are still in want of those of the middle class white-collar professionals. We look forward to seeing more works about this particular community that is fast growing to become the mainstream of contemporary and future China.
We are right in the middle of an episode in history that is the brooding ground for great documentaries and documentarians. Let’s continue to work together to produce and preserve a documentary archive of this unique age both for China and the world.
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