Awareness, communication and celebration were the buzzwords on the lips of panel members at the London SOAS press conference for the Filming East Festival.
The festival, which covers work from Chinese grass roots filmmakers through to mainstream productions, aims to encourage cultural exchanges between Britain and China.
To begin, we see the top ten One Minute Award films that won at last year’s festival. The shorts offer brief and tantalising snippets of a society that often only exists to us in the abstract.
There’s a chop-stick fight over the last bit of food reminiscent of Kung-Fu Panda, a boy who is heckled as his precious rice spills out of a hole while he lugs a sack down the street, a man who falls asleep on the train, and a clever little animation about the human life cycle.
It is striking how similar our cultures can be, a fact heightened by the advertorial or music video vibe that occurs when short films are put to music. But just as striking is how different as people grab the grains of spilled rice out of the dirt.
We’re also shown a stunning trailer of the BBC’s documentary Wild China that looks fascinating as it seeks to cover 95% of China’s vast terrain, from freezing deserts to steaming forests.
“But what value are film festivals?” ask the panel after the shorts have ended. A chance to see work you don’t usually get to see on screen, and to be entertained and informed, is the resounding yet somewhat obvious answer.
To illustrate their point we are shown Bing Ai, the very personal story of a female farmer who has the misfortune of living in the flood-basin of the Three Gorges Dam project.
This is ‘real China’ as the festival director Xiaoxiao Sun put it, and pretty grim it is too.
Feng Yan’s documentary provides an intimate portrait of Bing Ai, her husband and two children who grows oranges on the banks of the Yangtze River. Bing Ai is charismatic, strong, with great willpower and a real love of her land.
The bumbling local government officials who are ‘just doing their jobs’ are trying to force her to relocate with measly compensation. It’s easy to get swept away in the emotions of a tale of people being made migrants and having to relocate. But the human cost of China’s unprecedented re-engineering of its environment also assumes some prior knowledge of the country’s economical climate.
For two long hours we feel the up most pity for this peasant but are left feeling impotent. As a western audience there is nothing we can change in this alien world where even a headstrong peasant who dares defy the state for 10 years is left powerless and forced from her home.
It’s heavy stuff for a cold November night, and you start to wonder if it really is the best way to start a festival seeking to celebrate Chinese filmmaking.
