china

Wasted Orient

by James McNally on June 10, 2007 · 1 comment

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)

Tagged as: china, Documentaries, music, nxne

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NXNE 2007

by James McNally on June 8, 2007

in Documentaries,Film Festivals

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).

Tagged as: china, Documentaries, music, nxne, suicide

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Circus School

by James McNally on April 29, 2007

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

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:

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Duration: 15:33

8/10 (8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs07, children, china

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Exiled

by James McNally on September 15, 2006

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Exiled (Fong juk) (Hong Kong/China, director Johnnie To): Among lovers of Hong Kong cinema, Johnnie To is legendary. He had three films showing in this year’s festival (Election (2005) and Election 2 (2006) screened together, as well as this film) and this was my first experience seeing one of his films. I’ll be seeking out some others. Exiled is an incredibly well-constructed film. It’s like a Swiss watch, with every scene precisely set up and choreographed and nothing wasted. To has created a self-contained world and set his characters loose in it. Set just around the time of Macau’s reversion to the Chinese government, it concerns a group of hit men who come together when their boss orders a hit on one of them. Two pairs of men arrive at the target’s new home. The first to warn him, the second to kill him. After a kinetic set piece involving three shooters, precisely 18 bullets, and the target’s wife and infant son, the group ends up helping still-alive Wo move furniture into his new place, before settling down to eat.

The mixture of action, comedy, and sentiment is probably a staple of Hong Kong gangster films, but I found it fresh. The plot continues when the assassins agree to give Wo some time to carry out one last job to make some cash for his soon to be widowed wife and orphaned child. Things don’t go as planned, however, and the film bumps along from set piece to set piece until an inevitable but satisfying end. Each choreographed set piece is set up in such a way as to heighten the anticipation, and you almost don’t mind that none of these trained killers seems to be a very good shot. It’s enough that they’re all ludicrously macho, swilling scotch from the bottle and smoking as they fire bullets at each other.

Seeing this one on the big screen is a must, just for the sound. The musical score, by Canadian Guy Zerafa, veered between James Bond and spaghetti westerns, with a bit of mournful harmonica thrown in. It worked perfectly, as did the fact that the viewer can hear every single shell casing hit the ground throughout the film. Even the gunshots themselves seemed different from those in American films, with less blast and more metallic sounds. It certainly helped create atmosphere. While this and the choreographed gunplay never let you forget you’re watching a created thing rather than any semblance of reality, that actually made me more appreciative of the creator. He’s certainly created another Johnnie To fan.

Trailer

Official web site

8/10 (8/10)

Tagged as: china, hongkong, TIFF

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They Chose China

by James McNally on May 1, 2006

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

They Chose China (Canada, 2005, Director: Shui-Bo Wang, 52 minutes): An utterly compelling look at a forgotten group of US prisoners of war who refused to be repatriated to the United States after the Korean War. At the time, these 20-odd soldiers were branded “turncoats and traitors” by red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. In archival films, we see them making statements against Senator McCarthy and the current political climate in America, and although many of these archival films seem to have been created for propaganda reasons by the Chinese, the men claim that they were never mistreated in the prisoner-of-war camps. In fact, we see them organizing games and sports, even an “Inter-Camp Olympics”! Of course, having these men stay in China was a huge propaganda coup and they were quickly sent for “education” on the history of socialism and the Chinese Communist Party. Despite that, some stayed and even married in China. Gradually, most of the men returned to the United States, where they faced courts martial and scorn from the media and public.

It was a strange and almost forgotten episode in the Cold War and there is still a lot of ambiguity about what really motivated the men to stay. At the time, the American media speculated that they had been brainwashed (like in The Manchurian Candidate), but it didn’t appear that simple. It was just as clear that when the men returned home, the media used them in its own sort of propaganda war. One man’s interview with Mike Wallace was painful to watch, as Wallace continued to use the term “turncoat and traitor” over and over again. They were very different times.

The director’s voice over, in Chinese-accented English, was sometimes a little difficult to follow, but he did make clear that he considered these men heroes for trying to build bridges between enemies, and I’d tend to agree with that sentiment, even with so many questions left unanswered.

More information on the film from the National Film Board of Canada

8/10 (8/10)

EYE Weekly: *** (out of 5) (review)

Tagged as: #hotdocs06, china, Documentaries, history, Hot Docs, korea

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