DOCUMENTARY FILM SCREENINGS
Documentary filmmaking and sharing are an important part of Caochangdi Workstation’s daily work. The Film Forum of May Festival 2007 consist of the most recent works of Chinese independent filmmakers. The nine documentaries in “Documentary Unit” were produced mostly in the past year. The topics and styles of these films vary drastically: Transformation, a five-year production, was shot in a remote Yunnan village by a couple, Yang Gancai and Wang Yi; Happy Halloweens, is a documentary shot in a span of a night by Mao Ran; Bingai, in which Feng Yan documented the daily life of a powerless household who refused to be relocated; Super, Girls!, a documentary produced by Jian Yi on the Super Girl Singing Contest, a reality TV show which captured the dreams of tens of thousands of Chinese young girls; Noise, a diary-style documentary shot by Wang Wo in public spaces; Living in Nanjing Road, which documents the lives of beggars and bag ladies on Shanghai’s most renowned shopping street; as well as films documenting the filmmaker’s own family from within ? Father by Cao Fei, Mom by Xie Lina, and Sister by Ren Yu. All of these stories will meet the audience at Caochangdi during the Festival.
Film Forum always treasures the rich diversity in independent filmmaking. “Experimental and Shorts Student Video Screening” will carry on it’s legacy from the previous year and present Whose Utopian by Cao Fei, Shadow’s Body by Li Ning, Grown Up by Li Youjie and four shorts selected from a class assignment on “Public Space” for a documentary course at New Media Department of the China Fine Art Academy. In “Dance Cinema”, With Pina Bausch will introduce masterpieces of the renowned dancer. “Dutch Documentary Unit” will allow Dutch documentary filmmakers to take the viewers along a visual journey to lands beyond the Chinese borders, and allow them to empathize with the lives and encounters of those who live there.
1. Transformation
Directors/Cameramans: Yang Gancai, Wang Yi
Length: 120 minutes
Production: 2006
Synopsis:
The Akha live on the border of China and Myanmar in the tropical forests of Yunnan. ln 1996, a group of Akha relocated to Mandang to flee disease and bad luck brought on by the inauspicious birth of twins in the tribe. They lived in Mandang, in complete isolation and without the amenities of modern life until a border patrol road was constructed in 2001.
Spanning three years, the film tells of the slash-and-burn agriculture of the Akha and the demolition of their traditional houses and the construction of new ones with asbestos roots. lt shows the evolution from “lightning wieh resin” to electric bulbs. Transformation is a full account of the radical transformation of the Manbang Akha world between 2001 and 2004.
Bio: Yang Guancai was born in 1956, is a freelance reporter, photographer and writer deeply involved chronicling the lives of ethnic minorities on the verge of disappearance He and his wite livd among the Akha from 2001 to 2005.
Bio: Wang Yi was born in 1964, is a freelance reporter and writer ,wang Yi is also involved in the preservation and documentation of vanishing cultures She and her husband lined among the Akha from 2001 to 2005.
2. Sister
Director/Cameraman: Ren Yu
Length: 163 minutes
Production: 2007
Synopsis:
After a terrible divorce from her husband, a woman used her own strength to rebuild a new life and career in the United States. This woman is my sister.
However, when she brought her teenage daughter to live with her in the United States after they had been separated for a long time, she found that it was awfully hard for them to live peacefully together under the same roof. As both a brother and an uncle, I decided to interfere and see if I could bring them closer together. Unfortunately, things only got worse. My sister, under a lot of pressure from her job, was totally devastated by this family conflict…
Director’s Words:
Through the family’s daily trials, the filmmaker tries to reveal the conflicts and contradictions of these two women, who both have different backgrounds, cultures, social systems and occupations. The author also appears as a role in the film for the purpose of expressing his own attitudes, errors and innermost thoughts about life. In doing so, he abandons the normal movie practices of being hypothetical and supernatural.
3. Bingai
Director: Feng Yan
Length: 114 minutes
Synopsis:
By the time the Three Gorges Dam, now under construction, is completed, 1.13 million people along the Yangtze River will have been dislocated. The majority of them are farmers. Bingai features one farmer who refuses to move away from her village. The audience will follow her seven year struggle with officials, who pressure her to relocate, while a strong devotion to her land compels her to remain in the place she calls home.
Bio: Feng Yan, born in Tianjin, began making documentaries about rural China in 1994. She largely works alone. Currently, she is editing a feature film entitled Women of Changjiang River.
4. Happy for Halloween
Director: Mao Ran
Length: 82 minutes
Production: 2001
Director’s Words:
I shot the footages between fall 2000 and fall 2001. All footage with dialogue was shot at the doorway to Nanjie’s Fun Place at Wudaokou on the evening of Oct. 30, 2001. It was Halloween. Nanjie gathered us together for a rock-and-roll concert. It was terribly warm inside the room. Audience members and bands who were not performing chatted outside. To escape the high temperature, I went out and shot the footage with the Sony 100 DVCOM I had bought on the previous day. I was not used to the camera. The video turned out to be rough but the external microphone was not bad. When I viewed the footage at home, I found the dialogue amusing. A few days later, Wu Wenguang took me to a computer dealer where I had a desktop computer installed with chips for postproduction editing. Back then, I didn’t even know how to turn on or shut down a computer. I asked a colleague to read the software instructions for me. He memorized it, came back and taught it to me. Three months later, I completed the postproduction editing of the 82-minute video, with all subtitles in place. 
Bio: Mao Ran was born in 1970 in Guizhou province. He graduated from the Exhibition and Advertisement Department of China Elite Science and Technology Management University in 1991. From 1991 to the present, he manages an exhibition installation and interior design company in Beijing. His photography and video works are all made in his spare time. He has made two films, “Happy All Saint’s Day” (2002), and “Who Hears My Song?” (2003), as well as a compilation of photographs entitled “City Messages”.
5. Father
Director: Cao Fei
Length: 88 minutes
Production: 2005
Director’s Words:
My father, an old "official" sculptor, worked for many years in a Socialist Realist style. He made sculptures for celebrities, most of which were ordered by the government. His art career was deeply influenced by the ideology of his generation. In December, 2004, he was invited to make a six meter tall bronze sculpture of young Deng Xiaoping. I documented the working process of this statue, from the beginning to its installment. In making this film I was able to know my father better, both as his daughter and as an artist of the next generation. In this way, this film is an intimate portrait of "inside" images.
Bio: Cao Fei, was born in 1978 in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China. In 1997, she graduated from the Affiliated Middle School of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts and in 2001 received her Bachelors degree from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou. She lives and works in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China.
6. Noise
Director / Cinematography / Editing: Wang Wo
Length: 62 minutes
Production: 2007
Director’s Words:
Aimlessness in the camera, commonality in the eye, violent buzz of noise, deserted chaotic scenes… what the somewhat disorganized scenes give you is perhaps not enjoyment, not thinking, but further confusion -- you can see a fuss, promotion in all seriousness, violence under bright daylight, quiet sadness, seemingly naive adult games, carnival extravaganza where the whole country cheers, ghostlike fireworks and explosions which make people tremble with fear ? it is like offering a sacrifice to the noisy era. 
Bio: Mr. Wang was born in 1967 in Handan, Hebei Province, China. During his childhood, he lived in a power plant for combat readiness near the Tai Hang Mountains. From 1984 to 1991 he worked as a worker in a power plant but was able to begin studying at the Central Academy of Arts and Design in 1991. After graduation, he worked in Beijing CITIC Advertising Co., Ltd and Chuangwei Advertising Co.,Ltd as a designer and in 1998, returned to the academy to continue his study. In 2001,
Mr. Wang graduated from the Central Academy of Arts and Design (now the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University), where he completed his thesis on Graphic Design and Artistic Creativity and was awarded a master degree. Mr. Wang is a graphic designer for Lava Lase Design Company in Beijing. In 2004, Mr. Wang completed his first independent feature film, “Ma Tou Street”, which screened in a short film festival in Seoul, Korea. In 2005, he completed his first documentary film “Outside” and in 2007 he made “Noise”.
7. Street Life
Director: Dayong Zhao 
Synopsis:
They are from all over China, without true names or social relations. They call one another after the names of their hometowns. They make a living by collecting garbage, stealing, begging, and singing. Treading on the fringes of society, these people gather together in the alleys near Nanjing Road. In the hustle and bustle of life, some live hopefully and some happily ? others can’t bear the burden and go mad.
Director’s Words:
Shanghai is a cosmopolis dazzling in China's economic surge. Nanjing Lu is a place of orgies and indulgence. In the swarm of the busy city, there are people who bustle about the garbage bins on Nanjing Road and make their living off the trash of the hustling crowd. They are city pioneers. In my eyes, in order to read the city we had best start with them.
Bio:
Zhao Dayong, studied at the Oil Painting Department of Shenyang Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, and starts to work for his independent documentary in 2001, has films Street Life (2006), Ghost Town (2008).
8. Super, Girls!
Director / Cinematography / Editing: Jian Yi
Length: 160 minutes
Production: 2007
Synopsis:
Instant fame or eternal obscurity? A story of girls struggling to live up to their dreams in the summer of 2006.
It is the first HDV documentary ever produced on the lives of girls who participated in the popular Super Girl Singing Contest, a Chinese TV show modeled on American Idol. The contest churned out a group of 20-ish female super stars in 2005 and is arguably the single most important Chinese pop culture event in recent years.
Bio: Jian Yi was born in 1975, a native of JiAn in southeastern China’s Jiangxi province, Jian Yi is a filmmaker and a photographer. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, IN, USA, and of the Beijing Broadcasting Institute (BBI). Yi started his first job when he got a lecturing position
at BBI in ‘99. In ’03, Yi joined the EU-China Training Program on Village Governance as a communication specialist, filmmaker and photographer. In ’05 he co-founded the China Villagers’ Documentary Project together with filmmaker Wu Wenguang. Jian Yi started his China Dreams documentary series in 2005. Super, Girls! is the first independently-produced documentary Jian Yi has completed, and is the nation’s first HDV documentary film on the Super Girl Singing Contest.
9. Mom
Director / Cinematography / Editing: Xie Lina
Length: 93 min
Production: 2007
Synopsis:
Mom worked hard for me most of her life, I always had the impulse to document her, and I made this into my first long documentary film.
Before I entered college I was never separated from my mom, we lived together in that house, in that room, and slept on the same bed . . . Mom’s wedding picture was ruined, and I always wanted to fix it . . . I saw confidence in her dance steps, it was the first time she danced before me . . .
Bio?Xie Lina, is studying in New Media Department, China Academy of Fine Art, Hangzhou. Her short video works Grandmother (2006), Supergirls (2006)?had screen in May Festival of Caochangdi Workstation, Sino-France Exchange Video Exhibition, Beijing, 2006. Mom is her first feature length documentary film.