| China’s grassroots communication: reality through films |
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| Culture | |
| Friday, 21 May 2010 | |
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Living in a country safe from natural hazards has made it easy for us to generalise those in suffering. News, be it a flood in Bangladesh, an earthquake in Haiti or a tsunami in Samoa, will elicit inevitably our sympathy but rarely our contemplation. Nor do we realise that behind the debris and tears are stories of humour, support and disappointment that open an undistorted window to the raw human emotions shared by all of us. Home Sweet Home – after the Quake tells one of such stories. In the aftermath of the disastrous 2008 Sichuan Earthquake, a family in Pingqiao Village disagreed over their rebuilding plans. 80-year-old Grandma Liu wanted to build it on the site of the ancestral home, but her son Li wanted to move closer to the main road to have easier access to jobs in the nearby town. This quarrel became a daily routine, but it had no place for the daughter-in-law Xiong. As head of the village production team, she had the weight of persuading the entire village to agree to a government subsidised housing policy on her shoulders. As the most developed character, Grandma Liu significantly freed up the atmosphere of the documentary’s serious topic with her laughable stubbornness. After the village youths have gone to work, she got busy hoarding miscellaneous items from the ruin into her temporary shelter. When Li returned in shock and anger of the daily increasing pile of “junk” and tried to throw them away, the fragile old lady clung onto them with all her might, complaining in Sichuan dialect: “Dam that son of mine.” But Grandma’s white hair, wrinkles and wobbly footsteps simultaneously emphasise a frailty behind her strong-headedness. When she hid a tub on top of a high wardrobe, persistently trying to shove it into the pile of other items, the audience’ laughter suddenly paused as the camera swiftly moved from her hands to her tiptoed feet on top of a tiny unstable stool, an appropriate symbol for her own insufficient independence. Life in Pingqiao Village is rustic but sufficient and realistic. Roosters still performed their functions as alarm clocks, boiled rice constituted a significant part of most meals and Mahjong, the famous Sichuan board game, is a must-have. Complaints were not directed at the unfairness of fate but everyday concerns such as mosquitoes in the room, or, a bamboo scoop needing to be repaired. Bickering and gossips are commonplace, but they never turn into resentment nor impede the community’s strong bond. Mundane details of life can also be entertaining, such as Xiong calling an entire village meeting to discuss her matchmaking project for a bachelor, or, Grandma’s unhesitating shoving of a heavy bag onto the shoulders of neighbour who has offered to help. Nevertheless, when the villagers stood watching bulldozers shackling their old houses, they could no longer restrain their emotions. When the camera focused onto the rough face of an old man which was almost completely covered by a large bamboo hat, his discontinuous cry was juxtaposed onto the loud bulldozing background. As the voice-over narrated “Most of these families go back several generations and these are the same homes where births, marriages and deaths have taken place over and again. Seeing them toppled so relentlessly is not just the loss of a building. To these people, it’s the destruction of all that they and their ancestors toiled for… of the very fabric of their beliefs and traditions”, time seemed to have halted at a moment of extreme emotional intensity. As the story unfolded, Grandma’s character increasingly gained depth and gravity. She twice sang her favourite song “On the Songhua River”, which translates: “…My home is on the Songhua River, which has my comrades and my aged parents. September 18, September 18, from that sad time, I left my home, abandoned countless treasures…When will I be able to return to my beloved home?” Composed by Zhang Hanhui in 1931, “On the Songhua River” documented the emotions of the Chinese after the Mukden Incident early in the Second Sino-Japanese War, which led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. The melancholy embodied in this song aroused an intense patriotism in the Chinese to fight back at the time. But when repeated through Grandma’s coarse voice, it became more tragic particularly because a few scenes prior to her song the narrating voice reviled her biography: she was born in a wealthy family but sold to a peasant farmer after her father became an opium addict. She tried to escape many times, and even attempted suicide, but her rebellious spirit was tempered by maternal duty eventually. Just like she has once surrendered to fate, Grandma again was forced to join in the village’s reconstruction on the new site. The film ended as she walked further and further away towards a pile of debris with the voiceover: “Grandma will not be beaten. Life has not treated her well - a promising career that never took off, a loveless marriage, early widowhood. Yet, she’s is a product of her generation and of a tradition that refuses to be compromised.” By then, her former stubbornness became almost forgotten, leaving behind only the spontaneity of her character rendering her a lovable person and the universality of her suffering making her an emblem of human reality in the face of natural crisis. Home Sweet Home is filmed over a period of twelve months by an army film unit who stayed in Pingqiao to assist reconstruction and came into close contact with the local families. When Peng Wenlan, chair of the Meridian Society, received this documentary last year, she found it different to Chinese documentaries prior to the 1990s which contained a strong element of propaganda. Despite a little lack of sophistication, there was certain truth it could tell. Ms Peng subsequently cut the 90-minute film into a concise 45minutes version and added English voiceover and subtitle for an English audience. The voiceover became very powerful as an authoritative interpretation of the film’s events and placed the family’s story into the wider context of the earthquake. The film was shown on BBC World last year to great acclaim. When Ms Peng introduced the film at a screening organised by the Meridian society this week, she shared with the audience her observation of a positive change in the Chinese film industry in recent years. She said, “We’re seeing an increasing number of Chinese documentaries that have been made in an open and honest way, as opposed to the heavily propagandistic style of earlier films. It is this candour that makes them so powerful and convincing.” Home Sweet Home is only one of many independent documentaries made in contemporary China. As the Chinese film industry increases variety and freedom, it will hopefully develop into a clear window for the West to view a social reality of China unfiltered by political forces. Note: this film was sent to Ms Peng by the two editors, Liu Bingjun and Huang Nianfu, the latter of whom was one of her students at a workshop she conducted on documentary film production in Sichuan in 2007 for the BBC. Dimsum will organise a screening session for this film in October. Ms Peng will give an introduction and a Q&A session. Please look out for details closer to the time. Documentary made by: |
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