Chinese Documentary Makers on Australian TV & Radio

Ou Ning, director of Meishi Street and a guest of this year's Melbourne International Film Festival. Ou appeared as part of the festival's "Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Docos" program.

 The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) wound up on Sunday (19 August), and with it the Street Level Visions program of independent Chinese documentaries curated by myself. The Chinese program was a great success, with many sessions sold out and a lot of audience and media interest (see the previous couple of posts).

Here’s a final round up of the media coverage of the Street Level Visions program:

Chinese Documentary Directors in Melbourne

Directors Ou Ning (left) and Wang Jiuliang (right) with Street Level Visions curator Dan Edwards, at the ABC building in Melbourne, Australia.

Street Level Visions, the program of independent documentaries from China curated by myself, has been generating considerable interest in Melbourne over the past week, especially with the arrival of guest filmmakers Wang Jiuliang (Beijing Besieged by Waste) and Ou Ning (Meishi Street) last Friday.

Interview with Hu Jie, Director of "Searching for Lin Zhao's Soul"

Documentary maker Hu Jie.

The Melbourne International Film Festival is in full swing, including the program curated by myself, “Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Docos.” Tomorrow (Monday 6 August) at 11am, Hu Jie’s landmark work Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul will screen at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image on Federation Square as part of the program. A repeat screening will take place on Friday, August 17 at 6.30pm in the same venue.

To celebrate the screening of Hu Jie’s work, and the other titles in the "Street Level Visions" program, Art Space China has run the full text of an interview I conducted with Hu Jie in 2010.

Street Level Visions coverage in today’s Age newspaper

Zhao Liang's Crime and Punishment, one of seven titles screening at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival as part of the program "Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Docos."

The Melbourne International Film Festival kicked off last night to great fanfare. I’m very proud to be part of this year’s event, which includes the program “Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Docos," curated by myself. The Age newspaper today has an article by me about the program that you can see here.

There is also a short video interview with me on The Age website.

One of the films in Street Level Visions – The Transition Period – has already sold out, and several others are selling fast. So if you’re in Melbourne and keen to check out these films, jump online and book.

See you at the festival!

Chinese Doco Special in "Senses of Cinema"

Wang Jiuliang's Beijing Besieged by Waste, one of seven independent Chinese documentaries appearing in the "Street Level Visions" program at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival.

As announced in my last post, a program of Chinese documentaries programmed by myself kicks off on 5 August as part of the 2012 Melbourne International Film Festival. "Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Docos" is a retrospective of seven digital documentaries made over the decade or so, featuring work by Zhao Liang, Hu Jie, Ou Ning, Wang Jiuliang and Zhou Hao.

To coincide with Street Level Visions, the well known Australian film journal Senses of Cinema have run a series of articles in their new issue edited by myself and Adrian Danks focusing on independent Chinese documentaries.

Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Docos at the Melbourne International Film Festival

Zhao Liang's Petition, one of seven titles screening at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival as part of "Street Level Visions: Chinese Independent Docos," curated by Dan Edwards.

I’m very happy to announce that “Street Level Visions,” a program of independent Chinese documentaries curated by myself, will be screening next month as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival.

The program is a small retrospective of independent works produced in China over the past decade or so, many of which I’ve written about here at Screening China. As well as classics such as Zhao Liang’s Petition (2009) and Hu Jie’s Searching for Lin Zhao’s Soul, the selection includes Wang Jiuliang’s debut from last year, Beijing Besieged by Waste.

Directors Ou Ning and Wang Jiuliang will be in Melbourne as guests of the festival.

Here’s the full program – all screenings at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) on Federation Square unless otherwise indicated:

“Climaxes Can’t be Judged by the Critics”: the Debate on Documentary Ethics in China

Logo for the 8th China Independent Film Festival, where controversy erupted over the issue of ethics in Chinese documentary.

Ethics in documentary making is always a loaded subject that can raise the heckles of directors, viewers and subjects alike. Documentary makers not only have to negotiate their often fraught relationships with their subjects, but also have to consider the fact that their camera-mediated interactions are going to be put on public display on cinema and TV screens across the planet. Given the explosion in independent Chinese documentary making over the past ten to fifteen years, and the fact that many of these films involve a discomforting degree of observational intimacy, it should come as no surprise that debates centred on ethics have recently come to the fore in China.

The fault lines of the debate were thrown into sharp relief at a forum at the 8th China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing late last year (28 October-1 November 2011), when a heated discussion by academics on ethical issues was denounced the following day by a group of filmmakers in a series of “big character posters” (dazibao). Public posters proclaiming social or political messages have a long tradition in China, though they are particularly associated with the early Cultural Revolution years, when highly bombastic competing dazhibao from various Red Guard factions were plastered on every wall in cities across the country. Shelly Kraicer reported on the events in Nanjing for CinemaScope soon after they occurred, while the Harvard-based Chinese scholar Ying Qian recently penned a more detailed account and discussion of the issues thrown up by the forum in China Heritage Quarterly.

Cycles of Familial Abuse – Ji Dan’s "When the Bough Breaks"

The sisters survey Beijing's frozen winter landscape in Ji Dan's harrowing documentary When the Bough Breaks, screened recently at the "Seeing China" workshop at the University of Technology, Sydney.

If you’ve ever found yourself trapped with someone else’s family as they experience a major emotional meltdown, you’ll have some idea what it’s like to view Ji Dan’s documentary When the Bough Breaks (2011). “It’s just like guerrilla warfare,” comments one family member early in the film, although it’s unclear whether he is referring to life inside his family or the general conditions of life for those living in the cracks of Beijing’s fractured social landscape.