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Chinese Independent Documentary :
CIDFA044:
Flowers
Producer/Director/Camera/Editing: Song Tian
Length: 69 min.
Production Year: 2008
Synopsis of “Flowers”:
In 1934, the Japanese Manchurian Settler Regiments established Tianli Village and Tianli Shrine in the suburbs of China’s Northeastern city of Harbin. In the summer of 2007, also the year of the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, pupils from the various primary and middle schools in Harbin City come to Tianli Village to take part in the three-day “Comprehensive Practical All-round Education Activity Camp”, known simply as “The Boot Camp”. The objective of the scheme is to test the pupils’ “spirit and endurance” and make them “better people”. Over the course of three days, the leaders, teachers, headmasters, and military officers in this closed camp test the pupils’ endurance, making them undergo tough patriotic and collective education activities.
Director's words:
I know Tianli Village well. In the winter of 2005, I came to know about the village through the “China Village Self-governance Film Project”, which led to the production of my first documentary film, “Tianli”.
In the summer of 2007 I returned to Tianli. This time the object of my camera were not the villagers, but rather the “blossoming flowers” that had arrived in the village: the children. Following them with my camera, and experiencing the tough endurance tests they went through made me think of my own childhood experiences. I remember a nursery rhyme my teacher taught me in kindergarten: “Our motherland is a garden. The flowers in the garden are bright and beautiful. The warm sun shines on us all. Everyone’s face is lit up with joy. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Everyone’s face is lit up with joy!” These are the nursery rhymes our generations grew up with. They belong to our collective memory. After filming “Flowers”, I came to realise that the children in the film were, in fact, my past. I too was once a blossoming flower in that beautiful garden.
Filmmaker's Bio:
SONG Tian, born in 1980 in Heilongjiang, China. Graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Teachers' University in 2001. Then studied at Royal Holloway, University of London. In 2002, she went to France and in 2003 she began the "Cinema and Audiovisual Studies" at the University of Provence, and obtained the Professional Master's Degree of "The Métiers of Documentary Film" in 2006. Now she lives in Beijing and Harbin.
Her first independent documentary film “Tian Li” (2006, DV, 96 minutes) won a prize in “China Village Self-Governance Film Project” and "the First Film Prize" at "the 17th International Documentary Film Festival of Marseille", France.