Curator: Shen Shao-min
Producer／Director／photographer: Yu Guang-yi
Editing: YU Guang-yi, WANG Guo-sheng
Length: 90 mins
Production: 2004-2006
Synopsis:
The Last Lumberjacks followed the life of a group of loggers in Heilongjiang Province, China. It is a record on a kind of disappearing mode of production as well as living in human life.
Here the primitive forests have been exploited for over one century, the loggers still keep their inherited working way. Winter is the best logging season. Each year after a few heavy snows, the forest farm consigns a whole mountain or a whole valley to a contractor (“batou”), and the “batou” then entrusts a “sledge head”(“palitou”) to recruit villagers who have spare horses. Two villagers prepare a sledge and provisions sufficient for the whole winter, select an auspicious date, and head for the deep mountain. Before starting their logging, they always slay a pig to worship the Mountain God and pray for their safety.
A group of isolated loggers do hard work in an icy and snowy world like animals, yet their horses even fare worse. They work until die from exhaustion or accident. Then they have to be eaten by their in-tear host. In this winter, six horses died like that in Black Bear Valley. One horse is worthy over 3000yuan,which means the whole winter’s hard work of its host has gone futile.
Patch after patch of primitive forest has been cut down like crops in the fields in autumn. A log that has been transported out was made into coffins. In spring, the coffin was buried in the mountain with an old logger. People swept away the covered snow and pried open the frozen field. A big tree went back where it once was, with the people who cut it down.
Director’s statements:
I grew up in the forest area of Heilongjiang. In The Last Lumberjacks many of the village workers were my childhood buddies. After school we often went to play in the big shack where loggers lived, in which there were two big brick beds and most of whom were old bachelors. They came from Hebei or Shangdong Province in the earlier time. Sat naked on the brick bed, with a quilt over their bodies, they told those legends happened in the mountain in the Manchuria period, which was my most important resources.
Having been away from my hometown for about twenty years, in winter,2004, I went back and spent the whole winter among the loggers. During the shooting, I felt moved so much that the tears often shed down in my face. As if entered in a time tunnel, what those old loggers told came back to the reality, scene after scene. Nowadays,in the 21st century, people still strive so hard in order to make a living, this is just my hometown?
Finished the shooting, it was already early summer of next year. In the noise of the city, I spent the whole another year on editing.Everyday facing the huge amount of rushes, my sentiments split between the life of the loggers and that of the fashionable city men and ladies in the street, between the traditional regional culture and modern industrial civilization, between the forests that are being cut and the sandstorms floating outside my window……
This might be just the age we are experiencing!