Tag Archive for 'china'

Up The Yangtze

Published
by
James McNally
on February 7, 2008
in Doc Soup, Documentaries and Film Festivals
. Closed

Up The Yangtze

Up The Yangtze (2007, Director: Yung Chang): Set against the ongoing development of the Three Gorges Dam, Up The Yangtze is an intimate film about the momentous forces changing modern China. Director Yung Chang, born near Toronto and now a Montreal native, travelled to China in 2002 with his grandfather, who wanted to show him the great river he’d been telling stories about for years. They took one of the “Farewell” cruises which are designed to show tourists the landscape before it is flooded by the dam project. After this surreal experience, Chang knew he had to make a film. Though there are some hints of the film about tourism that he originally envisioned, he wisely focuses on the people being directly affected by this enormous public works project. China itself sometimes seems to be one giant construction site, and the growth of cities has led to an ever-growing hunger for the electricity to power them. Though damming the Yangtze was a dream originated by Mao, it wasn’t until the late 1990s when the project began to come to fruition. The result has been a massive forced relocation of more than two million people, as the rising water levels flood many villages.

Chang found the subjects of the film during the regular recruiting sessions held by the cruise line. Chen Bo Yu is quickly christened “Jerry” for his interactions with Western tourists. He’s 19 and an only child of rather well-off parents. Typical of the sons of China’s one-child policy, he’s a “little emperor”, arrogant and self-centered, used to getting his way. He takes the job in order to make as much money as possible, and at one point boasts that he’s making more than his parents. But he doesn’t survive the three-month probation, possibly as a result of an allegation that he shook down some tourists for “personal tips”.

Yu Shui, on the other hand, needs this job desperately, to support her family. Although only just out of middle school, her subsistence farmer parents can’t afford the fees to send her to high school, and suggest she get a job. They’re also keenly aware that their ramshackle hut by the river, with its vegetable garden, will soon be swallowed up and they’ll have to find paying work. Quickly dubbed “Cindy” by her employers, she struggles to overcome her shyness and the obvious class differences between her and the other employees. Her English skills aren’t as well-developed as her employers would like, so she starts her working life washing dishes in the kitchen. For someone whose ambition is to attend university and become a scientist, this humiliation, along with her homesickness, is difficult to take. But she makes a few friends along with her salary, and soon we wonder if she’ll return home at all.

Her parents had agonized about sending her off to work, and are clearly uncomfortable having to exploit her in this way. But her father also wants her to see the world, even if that just means the rest of the river, and at their first reunion, her parents’ pride is evident. But so is Yu Shui’s embarrassment. Part of it is the typical teenager’s feelings about her parents, but it’s also clear that she’s different from the other young people working on the ship. When her boss invites them aboard for a tour, it’s almost excruciating to watch. But you also get the feeling that she’s going to be ok in this new future, while her parents will continue to struggle.

It’s clear that China’s renewal is unstoppable, but that it is also proceeding without much pity for the rural population. In one scene, a shop owner tearfully pours out a tale of beatings and forced relocation as a statue of Mao sits benignly behind him. I wonder what Mao would think about a country still officially committed to Communism rolling over the very people it professes to revere. There is a time-lapse scene near the end of the film where we watch the rising water claim Yu Shui’s family’s beloved riverbank shack, and it wordlessly drives home the utter indifference of “progress” to the most vulnerable people caught up in it. Much like Jennifer Baichwal’s film Manufactured Landscapes (and the Edward Burtynsky photographs it is based upon), Up The Yangtze is a historical document of a time and place that will not exist for long.

Cindy's family

Official site
Donation site where you can help Yu Shui/Cindy’s family

UPDATE: The film opens theatrically in Toronto on Friday February 8 at the Cumberland cinema. I suggest you catch it on the opening weekend since there’s no guarantee how long the run will last. Seeing it on a big screen really does make a difference.

9/10(9/10)

Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (The Voyage of the Red Balloon)

Published
by
James McNally
on September 20, 2007
in Film Festivals and TIFF
. Closed

Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (The Voyage of the Red Balloon)

Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge (Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien): I have to admit that as much as I’m familiar with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s name, I hadn’t seen any of his previous films (Three Times (2005) and Café Lumiere (2003) being the most recent). That being said, someone I know told me that in his opinion, most of Hou’s best work was from the 80s and 90s and is actually pretty hard to find. Setting the film in Paris was admittedly a gamble, and deciding to make a sort of homage to Albert Lamarisse’s classic children’s film La Ballon Rouge (1956) an even bigger one. For me, anyway, it didn’t pay off.

We’re dropped into a story with very little exposition. Juliette Binoche plays Suzanne, a voice actor for a puppet theatre and a harried single mom. Her son, Simon, is watched by a new nanny, Song Fang, who just happens to be both Chinese and a film student making a film. So, with an obvious directorial stand-in in place, what happens? Not too much. Song uses Simon in her film project which is very much like the classic film, and we see footage scattered throughout the rest of the main film including, somewhat confusingly, at the very beginning, before we’ve even met the characters. There are also scenes where the titular orb floats outside the apartment when Song is not actually filming. I found its presence baffling most of the time, and the film, like the lives it portrays, as scattered and uneven, though well-intentioned. Suzanne’s living arrangements are messy and her relationships unclear, and by the end of the film, there’s really no sense of resolution. What I did like about the film was its wonderful use of natural light, as well as the corresponding naturalness of the dialogue, with characters repeating dialogue not heard the first time by other characters, and other realistic touches.

But in the end, I wasn’t really moved. My balloon, instead of taking flight, just slowly deflated over the film’s 113 minutes.

Trailer

6/10(6/10)

Wasted Orient

Published
by
James McNally
on June 10, 2007
in Documentaries and Film Festivals
. 1 Comment

Wasted Orient

Wasted Orient (Director: Kevin Fritz, USA, 2006): I’d seen the trailer for this on distributor Plexifilm’s site a few weeks ago and was really happy to be able to attend the film’s first Canadian screening. Joyside are a Chinese punk band based in Beijing and the film follows them on their first tour. This being China, the band starts with a 15-hour train ride to Guangzhou in the south of the country, and the long journey gives them plenty of time to drink. Drinking seems to be the constant in the film, and one gets the impression that anything more illicit than beer and gin may be simply out of their financial reach. Despite their constant state of intoxication and their aversion to bathing, the band are actually a likeable bunch of guys who are relatively proficient musicians. They name-check, either in interviews or by playing covers, many of the early punk bands and personalities from New York: The Ramones, The Dead Boys, Johnny Thunders (It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “Chinese Rock”). And these guys are punk in that early, primitive sense: they’re nihilistic, but they’re not mean, or political. They just don’t see the point in pursuing the lives their parents or polite society would prefer for them. In that sense, they’re not much different from their idols. But, of course, this is China.

Other critics (mostly Americans, I suspect) have played up the “Communist” angle, with variations on “Rockin’ in the Unfree World” and that sort of nonsense. The truth is that modern China may be more capitalist than North America, and what Joyside is rejecting seems to be materialism and the appearance of success more than anything else.

The film is very raw, and one or two people in the small audience (maybe 20 people) found it a bit too much and left. But I was riveted. Kevin Fritz has lived in China for several years, and got to know the band very well, so he has really captured a level of intimacy that hardly seems possible for an “outsider.” The beer helps, though, as in scenes where he features each band member in a drunken one-on-one with the camera. A bit surprisingly, each comes across as touchingly earnest and even a bit maudlin.

Despite the endless beer guzzling, the pissing and vomiting, the rude gestures and the poses of despair, these are just four young guys trying to make sense of their circumstances. It doesn’t hurt that they can rock out, too.

Official site for the film

7/10(7/10)

NXNE 2007

Published
by
James McNally
on June 8, 2007
in Documentaries and Film Festivals
. Closed

Sometimes things catch me by surprise. For instance, I had no idea that Toronto’s North by Northeast music festival (patterned after Austin’s South by Southwest) also has a film festival component. The whole thing takes place this weekend, but tomorrow has two very promising screenings that I’m going to try to get to.

A.J. Schnack’s film Kurt Cobain: About A Son has been getting rave reviews all over the place, and this might be the only opportunity to see this film on a big screen for a while. The film features audio interviews with Cobain recorded by writer Michael Azerrad for his biography Come As You Are, and Schnack has combined the audio with footage of Cobain’s three hometowns in Washington state (Aberdeen, Olympia, and Seattle). It’s said to be powerful stuff. Watch an excerpt from the film here. You can catch it at 7:00 pm tomorrow at the Royal Cinema (608 College Street).

Wasted Orient will be a different but no less memorable experience, if the trailer is anything to go by. Filmmaker Kevin Fritz follows Chinese punk band Joyside around the country as they drink, vomit, play some music, and generally despair over the Chinese music scene and life in general. It’s showing at 3:00pm tomorrow at the National Film Board Theatre (150 John Street).

Circus School

Published
by
James McNally
on April 29, 2007
in Documentaries, Film Festivals and Hot Docs
. Closed

Circus School

Circus School (Directors: Dingding Ke and Jing Guo, China, 2006): The filmmakers take us on a harrowing journey inside the world of Chinese acrobats, and the pictures are not pretty. Trainers push children as young as 8 to repeat their moves over and over, despite injuries and emotional breakdowns. This was a very interesting film because the filmmakers were young Chinese, and I’m sure a film made by a Western crew would have featured a lot of interviews with the children and their parents. Here, we just see the training and the occasional tirade by the principal or one of the trainers. The looks on the faces of the children tell us everything they are feeling, though they hardly speak in the film.

Acrobatics in China goes back hundreds of years, and it appears that the training regime has changed little in that time. Repetition, even when the children are exhausted, is the norm, and when things don’t go right, it’s common for the trainer to hurl insults and abuse at the students. In turn, the trainers are the subject of the same sort of attacks from the principal, as evidenced in one long and uncomfortable scene involving the teacher of the Triple Handstand group.

A few of the acrobats stand out. Eight-year-old Xu Yu is just adorable, even when the trapeze acrobats keep dropping her over and over. And Cai Ling, though 13, looks about 10, and struggles to keep his weight down even as he demonstrates his incredible talents. To see these kids so clearly suffering is heartbreaking, and yet, when we see their final performances, it’s almost enough to make us forget the rest. Almost, but not quite.

I knew before seeing the film that there would be quite an outcry from some in the Western audience. We’re not used to seeing such pressure put on kids. They were battered physically by the training and psychologically by their trainers. But the truth is that their families all pay to send the kids to circus school, and for some of them, it’s their only chance at a career.

Here in North America, we’re really not all that much kinder to our kids sometimes. I’ve seen films about competitive gymnastics where the treatment is just the same, and quite a few hockey-playing kids here in Canada face incredible amounts of pressure and abuse from their parents.

That being said, the young filmmakers did admit that they hope their film will help improve conditions for the acrobats. It’s a microcosm of a huge dilemma for China, who wants to hold onto its traditions while at the same time modernizing and opening up to the rest of the world. In that sense, this will be a thought-provoking film for all audiences, both Western and Chinese.

Here is the Q&A with directors Dingding Ke and Jing Guo from after the screening:


Duration: 15:33

8/10(8/10)