china

Dooman River

by James McNally on November 8, 2010

in Film Festivals,Reel Asian

Dooman River

Dooman River (Director: Zhang Lu): The tit­ular river divides North Korea from China, and the film tells the story of the vil­la­gers who live on the Chinese side of the border. Chinese-born Koreans like 12-year-old Chang Du have an ambi­valent rela­tion­ship with the North Korean refugees who sneak across the river to beg for food or to try to eke out an exist­ence without being dis­covered and sent back. Chang Du lives with his grand­father and mute sister, while his mother sends money back from her job in South Korea. His life changes when he meets a boy of his age who has crossed the river in search of food to bring back to his ill sister. The boys bond over a game of soccer and Chang Du invites the other boy back to play for their vil­lage team against another vil­lage. The bleak winter set­ting emphas­izes the village’s isol­a­tion from the rest of China and the vil­la­gers’ struggle to get by. Their com­munity exists as a sort of no-mans-land between the two coun­tries, but the pres­ence of armed border guards keeps people on edge.

The plot is thin but had poten­tial. Unfortunately, though, Dooman River never rises above the level of ham-fisted polit­ical fable. The cam­er­a­work is mostly static and each scene feels almost exactly the same length, giving the film the strange rhythm of a slide-show. As well, long stretches had very little hap­pening, but the attempt to tell the story entirely through mood is jarred in sev­eral places by melo­dra­matics which left this viewer scratching his head. Strangest of all is the impres­sion the film gives of these issues with the refugees arising just now, when the border has existed for more than fifty years. Villagers act like these refugees have just started appearing in their town a few weeks ago, and their exposition-heavy con­ver­sa­tions seem leaden and artificial.

Dooman River is playing Wednesday November 10 at 8:30pm at Innis Town Hall as part of the Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival. Tickets are $12 and are avail­able online and at the door.

6/10(6/10)

Tagged as: #reelasian10, china, korea

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Last Train Home

by James McNally on January 21, 2010 · 1 comment

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

Last Train Home
Update — January 2011: I’m happy to report that KinoSmith is releasing the film on DVD in March 2011. Order your copy here.
Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly doc­u­mentary screening pro­gramme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audi­ences in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver their reg­ular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs fest­ival itself.

Last Train Home (Director: Lixin Fan): China is argu­ably the world’s most important eco­nomy at the moment and the past fifty years have seen incred­ible changes, polit­ic­ally, eco­nom­ic­ally and socially. Many film­makers have emerged from the country, including a number of excel­lent doc­u­ment­arians. Chinese-Canadian Lixin Fan can proudly stand among them with Last Train Home, just his first fea­ture film as director.

In my lim­ited exper­i­ence, to make a great film about China, you must encom­pass the country’s vast­ness, both in terms of geo­graphy and of pop­u­la­tion, but also be able to focus in on indi­vidual stories. In this case, we are intro­duced to the Zhangs, a family of migrant workers, just as the par­ents are about to make their yearly journey home to their vil­lage to cel­eb­rate Chinese New Year. Along with 140 mil­lion other migrant workers, this is often the only occa­sion they get to spend time with their chil­dren and par­ents. Making their way from the indus­trial city in which they work to their vil­lage in the coun­tryside is an exhausting and stressful multi-day journey of more than 2,000 kilo­metres. Traveling by train, bus and ferry boat, they arrive exhausted and are able to spend only a few days with their son Yang (10) and daughter Qin (17), who have grown up under the care of their grandparents.

Despite the eco­nomic real­ities which make it neces­sary for fam­ilies to be divided this way, the Zhangs feel they are doing it so that their chil­dren will have better lives. They con­stantly badger their chil­dren about their grades, per­haps because they really have nothing else to talk about. Daughter Qin is reaching the stage of adoles­cence where she begins to rebel against her par­ents. She com­plains that they’ve essen­tially aban­doned her and her brother and a few months after they’ve returned to the city, she drops out of school to become a migrant worker her­self. The boredom of rural life for a teen­ager looks very dif­ferent from the per­spective of her par­ents who have been away for 16 years working in hor­rific con­di­tions just to provide their kids with this pro­tected upbringing, but that’s lost on Qin, who wants the “freedom” of working in a factory.

While this is a crushing blow for her par­ents, who wanted to see her finish her studies, by the next year, they’re ready to travel home again for the New Year hol­iday. They’ve been pres­suring Qin to return to school, and it looks as though she’s reluct­antly agreed. But this year’s migra­tion is affected by a snowstorm which knocks out the elec­trical grid and delays the trains for days. The scenes of huge crowds pushing each other are har­rowing. While the trip home is a huge hassle at the best of times, it become a ter­ri­fying ordeal when sched­ules don’t run smoothly. When they finally board their train, it’s clear that Qin is not speaking with her par­ents, and she spends the whole trip in sullen silence.

Things come to a head during the hol­iday, and Qin’s insolence leads to a phys­ical con­front­a­tion with her father. Eventually, like all par­ents, they resign them­selves to let­ting Qin go her own way, hoping that son Yang can finish school and sup­port the family. In the mean­time, they return to the city again, back to their mono­tonous factory jobs.

My syn­opsis makes this sound like a fic­tion fea­ture, and for all the intimacy the film­makers achieve, it might as well be. It’s helped tre­mend­ously by some very crisp editing, as well as some sweeping cine­ma­to­graphy of the lush Chinese coun­tryside. Last Train Home suc­ceeds in cap­turing both the epic scale of the changes sweeping today’s China and their impact on the indi­vidual fam­ilies strug­gling with them.

Two addi­tional notes. First the dis­claimer: my com­pany (Kinosmith) is the Canadian dis­trib­utor for this film. And second, the film is headed to the Sundance Film Festival, where it will com­pete in the World Cinema Documentary Competition.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Lixin Fan from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 15:48

Official site of the film

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: china, family, globalization

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24 City

by James McNally on August 21, 2008

in Film Festivals,TIFF

24 City

24 City (2008, Director: Jia Zhang-ke): Despite my best inten­tions, I have yet to see a film from the man some critics are now cheekily refer­ring to as “Jay-Z.” Known for films like The World (2004), Still Life (2006) and Useless (2007), Jia explores the seams between China’s ancient tra­di­tions and the dizzying pace of modern life in the world’s most pop­u­lous nation. In this, his latest film, he mixes doc­u­mentary film­making with fic­tional storytelling to weave together a larger nar­rative involving the workers of a ven­er­able mil­itary factory which is now being turned into luxury condos in the south­western city of Changdu.

Since this was my first exposure to Jia’s work, I can’t say for cer­tain that it’s rep­res­ent­ative of his style, but I sure hope so. Essentially the film is a series of mono­logues framed in long or mid shots inter­spersed with stately pans over the factory build­ings. His patient camera demands that we pay atten­tion to what we’re looking at. While some of the fic­tional stories are slightly more melo­dra­matic, all of the workers’ recol­lec­tions are moving. Combined with the rev­er­en­tial cam­er­a­work, Jia makes a poignant state­ment about the dig­nity of work. 24 City is an elegy for a way of life many in China are eager to leave behind, but in many ways it’s simply about the passing of time and about the way indi­viduals have little con­trol over it. Even though their work seemed crushing in its mono­tony, sin­ister in its pur­pose and at times over­whelming in the demands it placed on the workers’ lives, all of them seem to miss it. Or rather, they miss the small tra­gedies and romances that flour­ished and then faded, along with their youth, just like the factory itself. Lovely stuff.

Clip

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #tiff08, china, work

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Up The Yangtze

by James McNally on February 7, 2008

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

Up The Yangtze
Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly doc­u­mentary screening pro­gramme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audi­ences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their reg­ular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs fest­ival itself.

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)

Tagged as: china

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

by James McNally on September 20, 2007

in Film Festivals,TIFF

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)

Tagged as: children, china, france, TIFF

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