A call for documentary film proposals was announced in September 2005. In mid-October, 10 best proposals were selected from among 40 proposals submitted by villagers across the nation. The selection of the successful candidates was primarily based on the quality of the proposal, i.e. the relevance of the proposed topic to village governance and the plausibility of production of such a topic. The selection panel also considered a balance between genders, among ages and geographic areas. Previous experience in filmmaking was not required.
The selected villager filmmakers are diverse in their background: their ages range from 24 to 59; two of them are women; the eldest man in the group is an ethnic Zhuang from Guangxi and the youngest filmmaker is an ethnic Tibetan girl from Yunnan; eight of the ten filmmakers live and work in their home village, while the other two are currently making a living in the city; the villagers come from nine different provinces, ranging from the impoverished Northwestern province of Shaanxi to the prosperous coastal province of Zhejiang.
None but two of the ten villagers had ever touched a video camera before they received the awarded digital video (DV) camera from the project. One of the two who did have some previous experience is the 24-year-old Tibetan girl and the 26-year-old man who left his home village a few years ago to earn a living doing camerawork for a wedding company in a nearby town.
The proposals submitted by the villagers serve as a testimony of how strong the desires for expressions are out there in the countryside -- the villagers, who previously had only been the quiet object of curious cameras, have always had a yearning for expressions of their own.? Nevertheless, almost none of the selected villagers and their relatives really believed that they would receive a DV camera from the project-a luxury most of them can never afford to buy themselves. Even at the moment when they stepped into Caochangdi Workstation to participate in the training workshop, they were suspicious of how true this offer could be.
In the first week of November 2005, the 10 successful candidates were invited on a paid trip to Caochangdi Workstation in Beijing, where they participated in a training workshop designed to prepare them for the production of their proposed documentary films.
The training workshop was a major success, with a lot of interactions and exchanges of ideas between the trainers and the trainees and among the trainees themselves.? The villagers learned all the basic technical skills needed for shooting a DV documentary and helped each other analyze their proposed topics.
At the end of the workshop, each of the selected villager had been awarded a DV camera, a tripod and ten blank video tapes before travelling back to his or her home village. The villagers spent the month of November shooting their individual films. Three coaching teams led by Wu Wenguang paid visits to nine of the ten villagers on their shooting spots to help them solve technical problems. The teams filmed the villager filmmakers at work as well, as part of the efforts to produce Seen and Heard, a documentary film on the Village Documentary Project itself.
In the second week of December 2005, with financial supports from the project, all the ten villager filmmakers went back to Caochangdi Workstation in Beijing to participate in the postproduction editing of their proposed films. The editing process was very interactive: each villager filmmaker was assigned an editor to assist them to sort out the footage, structure their proposed story and operate the equipment. Each of the ten completed films is approximately ten minutes in length.
A Welfare Council
Concept and Camera: Nong Ke
Editing: Zhang Xiaoyan
Synopsis
The film documents a village meeting on the reallocation of a government-assigned poverty alleviation fund worth of 10,000 yuan. The village head convened the meeting and all the villagers, old and young, participated. The meeting took place under a big tree in the village. The money should go to twenty households that were in dire need of financial assistance, such as those families in which the husband had died, or had physically challenged persons, invalids, or many school-age kids. The review meeting followed a traditional, fair practice of election: bowls were put under the names of the applicants, and villagers took turns to vote by dropping beans in the bowls of those whom they thought should have the money. The village head counted the number of beans in the bowls afterwards and announced the names of those with the greatest numbers of beans. Each funded household would receive 500 yuan.
The filmmaker Nong Ke is a peasant who lives nearby this village. Like the villagers in the film, he is also a Zhuang (an ethnic minority). What is particularly interesting about this film is that the filmmaker places himself just like the other villagers-standing among them-and the camera's position almost never changes throughout the whole review meeting.
Nong Ke, age 59
Villager from Dujie Village, Dujie Township, Long'an County, Guangxi Autonomous Region.
A Nullified Election
Concept and Camera: Zhang Huancai
Editing: Zhang Xiaoyan
Synopsis
The election for the village head in this film took place in the Shijiazhai Village, Lantian County, Shanxi Province. The filmmaker Zhang Huancai is a local villager. He walked around the village everyday with his DV camcorder and wished to capture his fellow villagers' opinions and reactions towards the election. That is how those lively and palpable lives from the rural Northwest China appear in front of the camera: men working in the fields put down their work and rush to look into the camera, wondering what curiosity is hiding in there; a mother holding her crying baby remarks on one of the candidates: "He could be the village head? All he knows is eating!"; a woman carrying a washbasin warns the filmmaker with a laugh that he should be careful not to show it inadvertently to whoever; when a villager is asked why he didn't go run for the position of the village head, he replies tout court:"I am more eligible to be an 'eating head';" and there are those curious kids who howl into the camera: "This is a monster from the world of magic..."
The camera follows upon the heel of the able female Party secretary of the village: she broadcasts, mobilizing the villagers to elect a person who "is dedicated to the public goodness of the village, a cultured person who has a strong sense of morals and responsibility," she talks with villagers; she keeps answering cell phone calls; and she works hard to make arrangements for the village committee election. The election itself occupies only a small part of the film. It took place one evening in a classroom of the village elementary school. Tens of villager representatives sat at the election. The new village committee was finally elected, yet the film ends with a bulletin announcement pasted on a wall: "Due to the fact that the election committee failed to provide sufficient information regarding the qualifications of eligible candidates as decreed in the election law, and also because the ratio of representatives who participated in the election was not sufficiently representative of all the villagers, this election hereby is nullified..."
Zhang Huancai, age 45
Villager from Shijiazhai Village, Shijiazhai Township, Lantian County, Shaanxi Province
Village Head Wu Aiguo
Concept and Camera: Zhou Cengjia
Editing: Li Haihan
Synopsis
Wu Aiguo is a village head of over fifty in Changshou Township, Pingjiang County, Yueyang, Hunan Province. The villagers elected him to his current position. Facing the camera, he says: "I am quite a rebel. Someone like me might not have had any chance, but this year they dare not block me out, so the people elected me."
Calling himself as a "rebel," Wu Aiguo is a non-CCP village head. He loves wearing the green military uniform despite the fact that he has never been in the army. The villagers call him a "mobster village head." He explains how he wins that nickname: "I quarreled before with the township director and Party secretary in the township government, pounding my fists on their office desk. I told them that they had cheated in the elections and it was unfair."
Naturally a democratically elected village head would do more work for the village in order not to let down the voters. Such as: make arrangements to repair the electricity system that has been down for over ten years; visit house by house and make sure that all the chicken in the village get shots to fend off the contagious chicken fever; organize villagers to participate in medical cooperation; discuss possibilities of cooperation with investors from outside, etc.
The filmmaker is not from the village filmed in this documentary. However, judging from the familiar ways in which he greets the people being filmed, we could see that he knows well the village head and the villagers. Toward the end of the film, the village head seems a little unsatisfied with the shooting. He speaks to the camera: "You really don't know where the focus should be." After that, he walks away.
Zhou Cengjia, age 42
Villager from Changshou Township, Pingjiang County, Yueyang, Hu'nan Province.
I Film My Village
Concept and Camera: Shao Yuzhen
Editing: Ma Jun
Synopsis
Just like its name, this film is about the daily life in a village. The shooting itself resembles the daily life of the filmmaker Shao Yuzhen, a peasant woman over fifty. She captures what she sees, hears, talks about and meets in her village: several men (including Shao's husband) hang out in the fields discussing the land problems encountered by some villagers; Shao runs into the village head at the village committee office and asks him when the meeting on the land problems will be held; Shao also explains to fellow villagers that her filming is totally free of charge (unlike the TV stations). She even brings her camera when she goes to mediate between a fighting couple, saying "if you go on fighting, I'll record it all here." When she runs into fellow villagers, we hear some lively greetings and conversations that form part of the daily communication between the villagers: "Have you sold all your cabbage?" "Made a fortune today?" "Taking pictures here? What for?" "I'm taking pictures of you, just for fun."...
Most interestingly, when the filmmaker directs her camera like an interested onlooker to a household that is building a new house, we hear:
Owner of the new house: "What's that?! What are you doing here?! "
Filmmaker: "I'm just filming here for fun!
Owner of the new house: "Why filming us?"
Filmmaker: "For fun! Didn't you hear it? Can't we peasants have some fun in life like this."
Owner of the new house: "I don't buy that. Who knows what you are up to here; you want to put some kind of mark on us?"
Filmmaker: "This is for memory, not marking. Don't treat people's good will like the donkey's chop suey!"
Shao Yuzhen, age 55
Villager from Shaziying Village, Shunyi District, Beijing.
Returning Home for the Election
Concept and Camera: Ni Nianghui
Editing: Qiu Qian
Synopsis
A guy who has been away for ten years came back home for the first time. He wanted to take part in the election at his home village and he did it with a movie camera in his hands.
The filmmaker came home to Xiangjiahe Village, Hubei Province. Maybe because he has been away for too long, the filmed villagers are not yet used to his appearance, not to mention the "thing" he has in his hands. Thus we see the villagers' hesitance and distance in front of the camera.
At the election site, everybody is his own boss. All the filmmaker needs to do is to record the various individual values as embodied and expressed in this particular magnetic field called "election." At such a moment, the red-colored ballots weigh more than anything else.
The filmmaker says: "I came such a long way and waited such a long time just to come home and cast a ballot."
In this film we don't see fights or agitated crowds that are often found in elections. Everything looks smooth and everybody looks happy, possibly because they all willingly acknowledge the newly elected committee, or because they suppress alternative thoughts due to the presence of the camera. Or there are other reasons we cannot fathom. We just see: villagers carry chairs and come to the election site on the elementary school's playground; they knit sweaters, play with kids, eat goodies and chat with acquaintances about daily matters; the township director announces through a big loudspeaker that "the 6th election at Xiangjiahe Village now formally starts;" sealed ballot envelops are opened and sent to the secure voting rooms; villagers fill out their ballots, casually or with earnest; they cast the ballots into ballot boxes made from instant-noodle containers; they burn the unused blank ballots; they arrange, count and announce the ballots; the final result comes out and the elected ones lick their lips with content...
The film is barely ten minutes long, and it is a document of the whole election process captured through the filmmaker's own eyes with his camera.
His revisit of home is not lonely; the camera's eye accompanies him the whole time. Later, in many other days when he can't come back for the elections, he can still replay the footage and relive his memories.
NiLianghui, age 35
Villager from Xiangjiahe Village, Daqi Township, Luotian County, Hubei Province.
(Ni now runs a barber shop in Foshan, Guangdong Province.)
The Spirit Mountain
Concept/Camera/Editing: Tshe Ring Sqrolma
Synopsis
The film starts with the story of the Holy Mountain told by an aged Tibetan who lives in a village at the foot of Meili Snow Mountain. The village-Mingyong Village in Deqing County, Diqing Prefecture, Yunnan Province-is also the hometown of the filmmaker Cili Zhuoma. While being a holy mountain for the local Tibetans, Meili Snow Mountain is merely a picturesque tourist site or a place for adventures for visitors from outside. Could the local villagers worship their holy mountain according to their own traditions, or should they capitalize on its promise for tourism so as to change their material life? This little Tibetan village cuddling in a small corner of the world cannot escape the classical conflict between tradition and modernity that is unfolding in numerous places all over China.
The camera of the filmmaker records everything as if it were her own eye: conversations are conducted in the Tibetan language, life flows as it always does, tourists keep arriving from the outside, local young men all become horse-holding chaperons for the oddly-dressed tourists, local pretty girls work as tour guides, and the story-telling elderly keep worrying: the mountain cableway is being constructed, more people are coming and climbing in the snow mountain, the glacier will be melting, the mountain god will be upset, and then all the surrounding villages, along with the whole world, will have to bear the consequences of the god's anger...
Tshe Ring Sqrolma, age 24
Villager from Jiulongding Village,Deqin County,
Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province.
The Quarry
Concept and Camera: Jia Zhitan
Editing: Ma Jun
Synopsis
As explained in the opening caption in the documentary, this is a true story that is happening in the present tense: "The quarry in this film is in the mountain that falls under the responsibility of the 9th villager team in Leigongzui Village, Baiyun Township, Shimen County, Hunan Province. Because of disputes over the ownership of the quarry, operation in this place that has gone on for twelve years was forced to stop in November 2005...Villagers of the 9th team started to take actions to protect their rights...At the villagers' strong request, officials from the township government came to Leigongzui Village to work out a solution to the issue...The villagers' efforts have paid off: the quarry that has been put out of operation for three months now starts running again!"
During the whole process, the filmed villagers expressed their discontent without reserve. Even though they voiced strong opinions such as "if the officials don't think and speak for the people, they will sure have a miserable life," things that were against the villagers' will still happened. The villagers would surely try all their might to protect their well-being, and sometimes it's hard to make absolute distinction as to who is right and who is wrong. Everybody has his own story to tell, and that is how an interesting documentary comes into being.
At the meeting after the election, someone shouted: "He who has the people's trust has the world!"
Wand Detie, who was elected, says: "The united will of a people could move even the Tai Mountain. Nothing is more powerful than that."
The quarry started running again, and the voices of the people who made it happen would continue to be heard.
Jia Zhitan, age 55
Villager from Yuanyichang Village, Baiyun Township, Shimen County, Hu'nan Province.
Our Village Committee
Concept and Camera: Fu Jiachong
Editing: Qiu Qian
Synopsis
The filmmaker is the Party secretary of his village. He is also the director of the village committee. He himself appears in front of the camera at the beginning of the film: we see him open the camera lens cap, adjust the frame, and then walk to the podium in the village committee office, starting to introduce himself.
Then he interviews other members of the village committee: the vice-director, the accountant, the director of women's affairs, etc., asking them to introduce themselves and explain their work in front of the camera. Then they go together to work on the spot in the village elementary school, trying to find a solution to the problem of the dangerously decrepit classroom. Then they convene a meeting with villager representatives to discuss the school's problem.
There are many things in the village begging for attention. Apart from big issues like finding money to renovate the school and reinforcing family planning, the committee also needs to interfere with family disputes or help the poorer households to repair their leaking houses, etc. At the end of the film, the filmmaker runs into an elderly woman in the village who has neither husband nor offsprings. She speaks to the camera (as well as to the filmmaker): "I'm so miserable. I think of you as my family; everyday I wish that you could come see me..."
Fu Jianchong, age 49,
Villager from Jiguan Village, Leitang Township, Guangshan County, He'nan Province.
(Chairman of the village's Communist Party branch)
Allocation of Land
Concept and Camera: Wang Wei
Editing: Li Haihan
Synopsis
The film starts with the filmmaker himself seen squatting in front of the camera. We can tell that the camera is placed on a small hill next to a road and beyond the road we can see a village that is like any other villages on the Jiaodong Plain. This is how the filmmaker Wang Wei introduces the village behind him: "This is the village where I live. It has a population of 440, and has about 1,000 mu (about 166 acres) of viable land. It is a very poor place, and because of the poverty there are tons of bachelors who have no hope of getting wives..." As he talk, he is constantly interrupted by the honing traffic of trucks and tractors on the road behind him.
Almost like a character in the film, Wang Wei's presence is constantly felt as he talks while filming. Such as, "This is our village committee. What's written in the bulletin has been there several years before; nobody has ever changed it...the office is closed. That opening door is where the old janitor lives. This is our clinic, but the doctor is no longer here. He has become a businessman back home...this loudspeaker and several others in the village were installed several years ago by the government."
The film has something to do with land allocation. Many villagers wish to have the lands allocated as soon as possible, but the village cadres keep putting off doing it. Wang Wei's camera is right directed to the people concerned in this matter: the well-to-do ones, the poor ones, and the cadres who think they have all the explanations s for the current situation.
The film ends with a shot on a almost dried-up river that runs through the village. The voice is again Wang Wei's, kind of like talking to himself, "There was much more water in the river when I was little. When it froze in winter, we enjoyed playing on the ice. Now it's no longer a river; it's more like a ditch."
Wang Wei, age 28
Villager from Guanyinsi Wangjia Village, Guojiadian Township, Laizhou City, Shandong Province.
Did You Go Back for the Election?
Concept/Camera/Editing: Yi Chujian
Synopsis
The filmmaker Yi Chujian is a twenty-five-year-old peasant who comes to work in the city. Like many others like him who are called "peasant workers" or "migrant workers," he has been away from his home village for quite a few years. Yi's job in the city is shooting wedding videos. In this documentary, he films his fellow villagers who are of his age and who have also left home to find a living in the city of Jinhua, Zhejiang Province. They have worked in the city for a few years, running a photo shop or a home decoration shop, selling computer softwares, or working as a cook. Yi's question for them is "Did you go back for the election?" Their answers are unanimously "No." Why? "Because no one has told me about the election." Or "I'm too busy." Or "My parents filled out the voting ballots for me." Or "The election really has nothing to do with me. I don't care who is elected."
"What about the future?" Filmmaker Yi continues his questioning. Their answers are unclear; their eyes look unconcerned. That might reflect the attitudes of those urban-dwelling pre-peasant youth towards the rural elections in their home villages.
Yi Chujian, age 26
Villager from Xiayi Village, Tangxi Township, Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province.
(Yi now works in town, filming wedding ceremonies.)