Over the course of six years Zhao Dayong (趙大勇), an independent filmmaker from Guangzhou, China, spent many months living among the residents of Zhiziluo, an impoverished and forgotten village in the rugged mountains near the Myanmar border, and filming their lives.
Using his own money and simple digital filmmaking equipment he made Ghost Town (廢城), a quiet, hypnotizing, three-hour documentary that provides an extraordinary and intimate portrait of Chinese life.
Like independent filmmakers everywhere, Zhao worked with no guarantee of an audience, or even a place to show his work. By his estimates only a few thousand people have seen Ghost Town in China since he finished it last year. Several hundred saw it Sunday afternoon when the film premiered at the New York Film Festival.
But what makes Zhao’s commitment particularly noteworthy is that his project was apparently illegal.
The Chinese government has decreed that all films must be approved by government censors before being distributed and screened, including in overseas film festivals.
Zhao, 39, said getting the approval of the censors was never a consideration. “It’s like asking to be raped,” he said this month in an interview here. “The government certainly has its own agenda. They want us to stop. But at the same time we know we’re doing something meaningful.”
This mixture of defiance and principle defines China’s nascent yet highly dynamic crop of independent filmmakers who pursue their art in apparent violation of the law.
For decades the Chinese government had nearly full control over all aspects of the film industry, from celluloid filmmaking technology to financing to distribution and screening. An underground filmmaking subculture emerged in China in the late 1980s, but it began to flourish only about a decade ago with the advent of inexpensive digital cameras and postproduction computer programs that helped put filmmaking further out of reach of the government authorities.
Many of this latest generation of Chinese filmmakers have no formal film training and shoot on minimal budgets, often with small crews, or alone. Ying Liang (應亮), whose films have won numerous prizes on the international circuit, shot his widely celebrated debut film, Taking Father Home (背鴨子的男孩), using a borrowed camera. Relatives and friends were his cast and crew.
“Unlike in previous generations, the stars of this generation are not only Beijing Film Academy graduates,” said Karin Chien, a film producer in New York and president of dGenerate Films, a company she founded last year to distribute this new crop of independent Chinese films outside China. “They’re journalists, they work at television stations, they’re painters, they’re people who just picked up a camera and made a film for US$1,000.”
Output is still small. Several leading filmmakers put the annual production of unsanctioned, independent films at fewer than 200. But this work has provided unusual ground-level views of China that possess an unvarnished authenticity often missing from mainstream, government-sanctioned films.
“There’s been an extraordinary explosion of young filmmakers — quite a few of them are quite talented — who are dedicated to record and tell the real story of what’s going on in China,” said Richard Pena, program director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which produces the New York Film Festival. “That story is really more fascinating than the story that the regime wanted to be told.”
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