Li Wake’s The Crack, at the Asia Society

Xiang Yang is a badly messed-up person. The CCP, the Gang of Four, and Chairman Mao are responsible for messing him up. He started life with a “bad class background” and things only got worse from there. Not surprisingly, the film telling his tragic and lurid story has been strictly censored in China, but Li Wake’s The Crack screens safely and legally for New Yorkers this Sunday, as part of the Asia Society’s Chinese Artists on the Edge film series.

It is not hard to deduce why the Party never wants its obedient subjects to see Li’s film. Not only does it forthrightly depict the cruelty of the Cultural Revolution, it is also extremely frank in terms of sexual subject matter, which offends the Party’s puritanical sensibilities. This is no joke. The Wake is not for children—but it should be widely screened by free thinking grown-ups.

Young Xiang Yang’s life took an ugly turn when the pretty tenant next door was fatally brutalized by the Red Guards. Even before that, she was victimized with impunity by her so-called “lover,” because he had the “right” class background. Xiang Yang would voyeuristically watch through a hole in their shared wall. Clearly, those experiences started warping his understanding of sexuality.

In the 1980s, the grown Xiang Yang yearns to attend art school, but again, his bourgeoise background represents an insurmountable obstacle. Instead, he must labor in a factory until he deliberately maims his own hand. The disability allowance gives him some leeway, but his sexual hangups will most likely undermine any serious attempts at a relationship.

It is quickly apparent why The Crack is so politically radioactive under the CCP’s jurisdiction. Li clearly suggests the violence and corruption of the Cultural Revolution directly leads to Xiang Yang’s anti-social perversion and his compulsive auto-eroticism. In fact, Xiang Yang’s self-gratification becomes a metaphor for the sloganeering and theatrical outrage roiling China during the 1960s.

Light of the Setting Sun

Vicky Du ‘s family never really talked about their feelings. It wasn’t frosty Scandinavian reserve. It was due to deep family trauma. Sadly, that untreated trauma metastasized into more trauma. Du finally helps them unravel their painful issues in her debut documentary feature, Light of the Setting Sun, which is now playing in New York.

The Du family immigrated from Taiwan, but they trace their heritage back to Mainland China. Unfortunately, they retreated to Taiwan to avoid the victorious Communists’ brutal reprisals. However, they still kept in touch with various cousins and uncles who remained, at least until the Cultural Revolution. Eventually, Du’s parents learned the fate of their relatives, but they never discussed it with Du and her siblings.

Frankly, they also did their best to ignore problems within the nuclear family, at last until her bother Andrew dropped a bomb one day, announcing he just finished treatment for a mental breakdown. Ironically, that was a bit of a conversation starter, launching the family into therapy. However, their parents still resisted talking about their extended family, until Du eventually found a letter from one of the few survivors, cataloguing their painful fates.

Taiwan B-Movies: On the Society File of Shanghai

It wasn’t called “Scar Literature” for no reason. This adaptation of the Mainland stories that chronicled the crimes of the Cultural Revolution during the brief respite of the “Beijing Spring” period literally turns on the source of one of the protagonist’s scars. Technically a “B-movie,” Wang Chu-chin’s On the Society File off Shanghai is also loaded with wider historical and cultural significance, as viewers can see for themselves, now that it is currently screening online (for free) as part of Anthology Film Archive’s Taiwan B-Movies series.

Former respected military nurse Li Li-fang has been arrested for the most likely fatal attack on Wang Hai-nan, the black sheep son of a high-ranking PLA officer. Public security inspector Shung is under pressure to simply find Li guilty and close the case. However, he insists on mounting an investigation to uncover her motives. Shung always has been politically unreliable like that, but he is really pushing his luck this time around.

During the course of the investigation, Shung discovers Li and Wang were lovers, who recognized a shared aversion for the Maoist madness underway in each other. Unbeknownst to both, Wang’s mother (long divorced by his ambitious father) was Li’s mentor at school, but the disgraced principal tried to keep her connection to her son secret, for his own protection, after she was denounced during the Cultural Revolution. In fact, Shung has to win a staring contest with the Red Cadres still tormenting her, just to ask her a few brief questions about Li.

Society File is one of the films that made Liu Hsiao-fan a star, specifically in the Taiwan Black Movie subgenre of female revenge films. Li Li-fang is not exactly the sort of avenging angel she would eventually become, but she is certainly intense—especially her classic, career-making scene, in which she stabs her chest, just to prove how fearless she is. When you watch her, you can see how she could become a Taiwanese exploitation icon.

Art of the Real ’19: Breathless Animals

Even today, families remain the essential building block of Chinese social organization, especially when it comes to retirement and economic safety nets. Yet, the Communist Party has a long history of pushing policies to weaken family unity. Lei Lei explores his family’s history of trauma during the Cultural Revolution through a series of interviews with his mother in the experimental documentary, Breathless Animals, which screens during this year’s Art of the Real.

Breathless is an exercise in found art, crafted out of photographs, magazines, and cast-off footage Lei Lei has collected. Yet, it is also a work of oral history, wherein his mother chronicles her family’s painful milestones from the period of Cultural Revolution until the 1980s thaw, as well as her own concurrent personal experiences. Although her memories are often presented in a fragmentary and elliptical manner, viewers will clearly come to understand how the tribulations her parents endured caused tremendous emotional anxiety for her (that frequently manifested in her dreams of ominous animals).

There is no doubt her testimony is the most crucial element of Breathless. Lei Lei also assembles some striking images, which he sometimes partially animates in clever ways. However, his aesthetic austerity does not always work hand-in-glove with the story-telling aspect of the film (but obviously that earned it an invite to Art of the Real).

In many ways, Breathless represents the fractured and mysterious nature of memory, but both family and national history would probably be better served by a smoother and more accessible account of their Cultural History years—even if it is as straight forward as Wang Bing’s static steady-shot talking-head interview documentary, Fengming: A Memoir. After all, the Party remains in denial, determined to pretend the Cultural Revolution (as well as the Great Leap Forward) never happened.

Lei Lei has skills and his mother has important testimony to recount, but they combine rather awkwardly here. Of course, both aspects pretty much guarantee the film will never see the inside of a Mainland movie theater, both separately and most definitely when taken together, which makes it worth seeing just on principle. Indeed, this is absolutely a case where the act of remembering is significant. Recommended for experienced patrons of experimental cinema, Breathless Animals screens tomorrow (4/27) as part of Art of the Real ’17.

Feng Xiaogang’s Mysteriously Delayed Youth

It was a time of macro and micro bullying. In the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, He Xiaoping assumes the abuse she has endured all her life will stop once is accepted into a PLA dance troupe. Alas, social hierarchies are just as rigid within the ranks of the military company. As the daughter of an accused Rightist in a re-education camp, she still finds herself at the bottom of the pecking order. The friendships and rivalries within her troupe will span decades in Feng Xiaogang’s maybe not so mysteriously delayed Youth (trailer here), which is now playing in New York.

Feng has helmed some of Mainland China’s most patriotic blockbusters, so observers were surprised when Youth was suddenly pulled from its scheduled October 1^st release date. Some speculated the scenes of the never-spoken-of Sino-Vietnamese War were to blame, but it could just as easily be the frank depiction of Cultural Revolution’s injustices. Frankly, it is a miracle this film was allowed any kind of release whatsoever.

Indeed, for reasons that we eventually learn over time, the Cultural Revolution indirectly led to a rather rash act that immediately starts He off on the wrong foot with her more connected troupe-mates. Only the beloved Liu Feng (whose name is a play on that of propaganda martyr Lei Feng) ever shows her any compassion. Even the narrator, Xiao Suizi, is too timid to stand up for her, thereby risking social ostracism herself. Yet, that is precisely why Xiao rather than He is ultimately the film’s tragic figure.

Even after the Cultural Revolution ends with a whimper, the troupe is still caught up in dangerously tumultuous times. He will transfer to the nursing corps just in time to serve during the war with Vietnam. China would prefer to forget that one, but if reminded, they insist they were victorious, but the gore He witnesses suggests otherwise. Liu will also witness the horrors of war first-hand, thanks to a scandal that gets him cashiered out of the performance troupe.

In many ways, Youth is the film the respectable but over-hyped Testament of Youth was cracked up to be, but it is also much more. Despite the nostalgic tone, it clearly indicts modern China for deliberately turning its back on the service and sacrifice of Liu’s generation. However, at its most fundamental level, Youth is just an achingly sensitive coming of age drama. Even though very few viewers (even in China) will have served in PLA dance troupes, it will still evoke memories of boarding school, college, basic training, or whatever, when you were young and living amongst with a group of people your age. Some you liked, some you couldn’t stand, but you were all stuck going through the same things together.

Huang Xuan is still probably the best-known cast-member. He has been a solid and sometimes brave performer, especially in the films of Lou Ye, but his work as Liu is probably his most mature and fully dimensional performance yet. Miao Miao’s He is often so nakedly vulnerable, it is downright discomfiting to watch her. However, the greatest discovery might be the strikingly expressive Elane Zhong Chuxi as Xiao. Imagine having your heart-broken repeatedly by Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. That’s what her performance is like.

It is time for a major Feng Xiaogang retrospective. It is fair to say the political-ideological implications of Youth are complicated, which makes it interesting to unpack. It is also his follow-up to the absolutely exceptional I am not Madame Bovary, which was overtly critical of government corruption in China. Plus, his ostensibly larky Personal Tailor had some unexpected social commentary late in the third act. Could it be the man who helmed rah-rah films like Assembly, Back to 1942, and Aftershock is developing subversive tendencies? Whatever the cause, he is producing some of his best films.

Regardless of what it says about Feng continuing artistic evolution, Youth is a major film, from a major filmmaker. It is set against a sprawling canvas, but it has an exquisitely intimate feel, beautifully (Oscar-worthily) lensed by Luo Pan. Very highly recommended, Youth is now playing in New York, at the AMC Empire.

SFFILM ’17: Xiu Xiu the Sent-Down Girl

The Cultural Revolution was supposed to sweep away all unfair advantageous derived from wealth and social connections, right? Try telling that to a fifteen-year-old nick-named Xiu Xiu. As the daughter of poor laboring parents, she cannot buy herself a discharge from her involuntary service in the “Down to the Countryside” Movement. Unfortunately, her beauty will only attract more exploitation in Joan Chen’s Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl, which will have a special 20-year anniversary screening at the 2017 San Francisco International Film Festival, with the ageless director scheduled to attend.

Co-adapted by Chen and co-screenwriter Yan Geling from Yan’s own novel, Sent-Down is narrated by the boy in class who carried a torch for Xiu Xiu, but would not be joining her in the Sent-Down social engineering experience, because his parents were high-ranking Party members. Much to her trepidation, Xiu Xiu is sent to the occupied nation of Tibet, to learn the sort of animal handling and husbandry skills that were so needed in the big city of Chengdu.

Initially, Xiu Xiu’s early months in the Tibetan base camp pass without incident for her, but the disappearance of her friend Chen Li and the subsequent lack of concern from the authorities obviously holds grim foreboding implications. Eventually, she is sent to live with gruff horseman Lao Jin to learn horsemanship. Rather awkwardly, she will be sharing his small yurt, but she need not worry about him possibly taking advantage. Remember Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises? Lao Jin suffered a similar injury—and apparently, everyone knows about it.

However, the taciturn horseman will still fall in love with Xiu Xiu, even though he is incapable of acting on his feelings. While she eventually develops a platonic affection for him as well, she still yearns to return to her family and friends in Chengdu. Ill-advisedly, she will submit to the sexual demands of several supposedly influential minor officials, in hopes they will facilitate her transfer. At such times, the heartbroken Lao Jin is forced to watch in a literal state of impotency, as Xiu Xiu is horribly misused and abused.

This might be the most gut-wrenching portrayal of love ever portrayed on screen. Yet, it also might be the purest cinematic manifestation of love as well. Rarely, has a film so lovely to look at been so difficult to watch. Accomplished cinematographer Lü Yue (who also directed the Cultural Revolution-themed drama Foliage) soaks up the stunning Tibetan vistas and makes the crimson reds of Xiu Xiu’s wardrobe pop off the screen. However, he also forces us to watch her victimization from an intimate vantage point, just like Lao Jin.

Li Xiaolu (then billed as Lu Lu) gives an absolutely heart-stopping performance as Xiu Xiu. Frankly, she can be a bit immature at times, which is why she is so convincing as a fifteen-year-old girl shipped off to the Steppe to satisfy the Gang of Four’s perverse ideological caprices. However, Lopsang might even be more devastating as the physically and spiritually wounded Lao Jin.

Chen is an exquisitely sensitive director, yet she never waters down Xiu Xiu’s reality, sparing viewers none of her suffering. It really packs a wallop, because Chen and editor Ruby Yang (the Oscar winning documentarian) never cop out on us. It is not hard to see why the Party used the film’s lack of bureaucratic approvals for shooting on-location in Tibet to censor it on the Mainland. Nevertheless, Xiu Xiu went on to nearly sweep the Golden Horse Awards (Taiwan’s Oscars). Having a chance to watch it with Chen in attendance would be a pleasure and a privilege Bay Area residents should absolutely not pass up, when the San Francisco International Film Festival holds its special anniversary screening this Saturday (4/8).

WFA ’17: Beyond the Curtain (short)

Even though Chinese opera has a long tradition, all but eight so-called “model operas” were banned during the Cultural Revolution. Not surprisingly, comic books faced a similar, but possibly more stringent prohibition. Yet, a mysterious man will spark a young boy’s interest in both, despite the oppressive conditions mandated by the Gang of Four in Haixu Liu’s short film Beyond the Curtain (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Winter Film Awards.

Hai’s family has relocated to the provinces, but they have largely been spared the worst of the Cultural Revolution. They certainly seem to be sufficiently poor, since Hai lacks even the simple toys enjoyed by his classmates. One day, a mysterious homeless man starts to take an interest in the boy, giving him a few modest gifts, including a series of hand-drawn comic books that begins the narrative of a dark and stormy operatic tale of courtly intrigue.

With tragic inevitability, Hai’s comics and discovered. Consequently, his parents and local cadres force him to denounce the homeless man. Although the resulting guilt and shame will haunt Hai all his life, he will not understand the full significance of his forced betrayal until he visits that same provincial village decades later, returning as a successful opera director.

Curtain really is bittersweet in the fullest sense of the word. While the pain from the Cultural Revolution lingers, the inspiration stoked by the mysterious vagabond also has a lasting, edifying effect. Somehow, Liu tightly bundles up every conceivable emotional response in his potent happy-sad pay-off, getting key assists from his small but talented ensemble. As young Hai, Zhiwen Zhang is arrestingly open and earnest, while Xianli Meng is hauntingly dignified and sad as the homeless man.

Liu also has an impressive eye for visual composition. He dramatically contrasts the drabness of life during the Cultural Revolution with the lush, stylized sets of the opera unfolding in Hai’s comic books. Arguably, Curtain is more cinematic than most full length features. In fact, Liu fits plenty of character development into its twenty-seven-minute running time, telling quite a dramatic, era-spanning story with great economy. Very highly recommended, Beyond the Curtain screens this Sunday night (2/26) and the following Wednesday (3/1) as part of programming blocks of the 2017 Winter Film Awards.

The Two Horses of Genghis Khan: Urna’s Odyssey of Song

Under Communism, the jealous Communist regimes (Soviet and Chinese) vilified Mongolia’s national hero, Genghis Khan (who was in fact quite progressive, even by contemporary standards). During the Cultural Revolution, all traditional music was banned, so a tune extolling the virtues of the great Khan’s steeds would be doubly anathema. However, the song held tremendous meaning for Mongolian vocalist Urna Chachar Tugchi’s family, so she set out to reclaim their cultural heritage, verse by verse. Byambasuren Davaa chronicled her song-hunting odyssey in The Two Horses of Genghis Khan (trailer here), which releases today on DVD from Corinth Films.

Urna (as she is often simply billed, like Adele) grew up in a musical family, haunted by the Cultural Revolution. At the height of the horrors, her grandmother’s prized horse-head violin was destroyed. Only the carved neck remained, on which some of the lyrics to the song “The Two Horses of Genghis Khan” were still legible. The symbolic significance for the divided Mongolian homeland is hard to miss.

Having gained international prominence in what might be termed “world music” circles, the Inner Mongolian Urna arranges a concert with an Outer Mongolian classical ensemble to premiere the rediscovered song. At that point, she sets off into grasslands in search of elderly Mongolians who might still remember the lyrics.

Unfortunately, during the early stages of her journey, she only finds the lingering effects of deliberate cultural and environmental devastation. As in Tibet, the old regime was not a wise steward of Mongolia ecology and the current government had other fish to fry, such as the 2008 riots, which broke out just after filming wrapped. Frankly, viewers will suspect some of the old timers Urna meets might remember the song better than they let on, but simply do not feel comfortable admitting otherwise, given the past efforts devoted to suppressing traditional culture.

Fortunately, Urna has a stirring voice and a warm, engaging presence, which give her immediate credibility with the Outer Mongolians she encounters and the viewers watching from the comfort of home. The wide open vistas are also quite a sight to take in, making THoGK an unusually visual documentary. Indeed, cinematographer Martijn van Broekhuizen (currently shooting the reboot of The Crow) frames some pretty incredible images.

The climatic performance would seem to end the journey on a satisfyingly uplifting note, but the final post-credits captions offer a chilling parting dose of reality. They also underscore why Urna’s mission of cultural restoration is so important and necessary in a world of ideological strife. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Urna, Shen Yun, and similar efforts to reclaim the cultural diversity lost under the successive mass movements of the Chinese Communist regime, Two Horses of Genghis Khan releases today (9/27) on DVD, from Corinth Films.

BFF ’16: China’s 3Dreams

The “Chinese Dream” has become the CCP’s latest new-and-improved propaganda slogan, but for many Chinese citizens it holds deeply ironic connotations, especially for those fully aware of the nation’s chaotic Maoist-era mass movements. Recognizing the gaps in her family history often coincided with the gaps in the official history she learned at school, Zhang Lei set out to uncover the truth about her parents and grandparents, as well as her country, hoping to reach some cathartic enlightenment. Nick Torrens documents the decades-long process in China’s 3Dreams (trailer here), which screens during the 2016 Brooklyn Film Festival.

The troubles and neuroses of Zhang’s family pre-date the Cultural Revolution, starting with her grandfather’s long-term imprisonment during the Anti-Rightist campaign. Even after his release, the patriarch was still so politically radioactive Zhang’s grandmother reluctantly banished him from the family. Her parents did not fare much better during the Cultural Revolution either. The resulting guilt and shame have largely poisoned her mother’s relationship with Zhang.

Yet, the young woman never really understood those grandiose government campaigns that profoundly disrupted her family, so with the help of a supportive cousin, she will seek out eye witness accounts from family friends and other survivors. Unfortunately, the government’s policy of denial will complicate her investigation (as the Party intended). She even finds the only extant Red Guard cemetery in Chongqing padlocked to visitors. Of course, life does not stand still for Zhang during the nearly twenty years Torrens followed her. We also see her organizing her neighbors in Chongqing’s historic district to stand-up to a real estate developer’s strong-arm thugs. Regardless of the context, she is not inclined to accept apathy, which makes the film quite inspiring, in a gritty, unsentimental way.

Indeed, 3Dreams probably could have been four times longer without feeling draggy. It captures a heck of a lot of contemporary Chinese cultural-social-political trends and explains how they were caused by ideological spasms forty or fifty years ago. Of course, it is a great help that Zhang is Torrens’ focal protagonist. She is refreshingly smart, a highly engaging screen presence, and pretty darn gutsy, all things considered.

Torrens also deserves credit for assiduously winning and justifying Zhang and company’s trust. His access was definitely up-close-personal and often extremely revealing. According to the post-screening Q&A, Torrens will only screen the film in China under tightly controlled conditions, with all the participants’ prior agreement. Frankly, with the Beijing International Film Festival essentially in exile, there are virtual no venues to screen an independent documentary like 3Dreams anyway.

Throughout 3Dreams, Torrens adroitly uses the personal experiences of Zhang’s family and their close contemporaries as a microcosm for China in its totality. However, Zhang also consistently proves herself worthy of documentary treatment on an individual level. The truth will not set her free, but it might ease her mind somewhat. The audience will be rooting for her. Highly recommended, China’s 3Dreams screens again this Wednesday (6/8) at the Wythe Hotel, as part of the Experiment Edition of the Brooklyn Film Festival.

China Institute Film Course: Foliage

They were like the Sharks and the Jets of the Cultural Revolution (but without song). Two competing PLA work teams have been sent down to the Yunnan countryside. They come from different backgrounds, but both are very interested in Ye Xing-yu. When she falls for the rebellious leader of the rival team, it inevitably leads to heartbreak in Lü Yue’s Foliage, which is the subject of this week’s Chinese Film Short Course lecture at the China Institute in New York.

Ye never felt like she belonged in the Yunnan camp—and who could blame her for that? However, it is not such a bad fit for her childhood pal and de facto boyfriend Yuan Ding-guo, who generally prefers to lower his head and plug away. Ye desperately hopes for a discharge to care for her widower father after his stroke, but her status as an “intellectual” will make that difficult. At least she will not be late returning from a visit home, thanks to the intercession of Liu Si-mong.

Naturally, Liu is quite taken with Ye. After years of Yuan’s quiet bashfulness, she is also rather impressed with his forthright interest. Unfortunately, a pickpocketing incident in Red Post Town (masterminded by Liu) will irreparably poison relations between the two work groups. Ye will try to act as a peacemaker, but her platoon will not have it. Instead, they intend to use her as bait for Yuan, whether she cooperates or not.

Foliage gives viewers a different perspective on the Cultural Revolution, but it is still not what you would describe as positive. Ye’s platoon are frequently derided as the “intellectuals” and “class enemies” due to their education and families’ professional backgrounds. In contrast, Liu’s platoon are more rustic types. They might very well have volunteered just to have a job, whereas Yuan’s colleagues frequently profess to believe in their mission (which seems to entail senselessly despoiling the land, from what we see). It is the same old class warfare, but turned inside-out, standing on its head. Frankly, it makes you wonder which team Bernie Sanders would throw his lot in with, if he were there (but he would surely expect to be part of the Gang of Four).

Still, the extent to which everyone loses their heads over Ye at a time so fraught with irrational ideological violence somewhat stretches credibility, even if she is played by Shu Qi, who it must be admitted, absolutely lights up the screen. She effectively develops some radically different screen chemistry with her two competing leading men. You can feel her comfort with Fan Bing’s Yuan, like an old shoe, and the passion that percolates with Liu Ye’s Liu Si-mong. However, Qi Huan steals scene after scene as Ye’s cute but sadly tragic best friend Wei Hung.

Fortunately, the platoon factions are not productive enough at raping the environment to deny Lü his lovely natural backdrops. Best known as a cinematography, he has shot several Zhang Yimou films, Joan Chen’s Cultural Revolution drama, Xiu Xiu: the Sent-Down Girl, and Feng Xiaogang’s explicitly jingoistic Assembly and Back to 1942, so he has range and flexibility. He helms the love triangle with great sensitivity, conveying all the angst and yearning, without descending into melodrama. As a result, Foliage is a wonderfully sad and sweeping story of love sabotaged by the macro forces of history, highly recommended, if you can find it. Indeed, there should be no shortage of historical and political context to explore when Foliage is the lecture topic this Wednesday (5/25) at the China Institute.

Tribeca ’16: Fear (short)

When a totalitarian state uses violence, intimidation, and humiliation to rule over its people, it is hardly surprising when clinical depression develops as a by-product. Yet, we rarely address the lingering emotional issues for those who live through traumatic oppression, like the kind wrought by Mao and Stalin. For victims, this often layers on additional levels of stigma. Dr. Zenglo Chen would know only too well. He survived the Cultural Revolution, but the atrocities and privations he endured continued to torment him over the subsequent decades. Dawn Dreyer & Andrea Love chronicle his healing process in the animated documentary short Fear (trailer here), which screened at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

At the age of four, Dr. Chen’s parents were persecuted and eventually condemned to re-education camps, leaving the young boy in the care of his twelve-year-old sister. Given the hardships his family endured, Chen was certainly entitled to periodic bouts with the blues. Unfortunately, his survivor’s guilt and abandonment issues would prove emotionally paralyzing, even after he moved to America. Despite his training as an organizational psychologist, Dr. Chen had trouble “curing” himself. It was not until he integrated spiritual elements into his life that Dr. Chen finally started feeling at peace with himself.

It turns out those Gideon Bibles in hotel rooms do some genuine good from time to time, at least judging from Dr. Chen’s story. Indeed, there is a great deal we can learn from the way Dr. Chen balances his personal faith with the science and medicine of his vocation. It is an inspiring film in many ways, sensitively rendered by Love, the animator, through hand-drawn and stop-motion techniques.

Dr. Chen is a real role model, but his life-story is much more complicated than “mere” triumph over adversity. In a brief seven minutes, Dreyer & Love give viewers a sense of that rich complexity. Still, there is considerably more uplift in Fear than the vast majority of documentaries on the Cultural Revolution and mental illness. It is a deeply moving film that features some cool animation as an extra added bonus. Very highly recommended as a stand-alone film on its own merits, Fear will be incorporated into Dreyer & Love’s feature-length project Bipolar Girl Rules the World and Other Stories, following its screening as part of the Whoopi’s Shorts program at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

DOC NYC ’15: Dreaming Against the World (short)

What were the crimes artist and poet Mu Xin was arrested for during his lifetime? Hardcore offenses, like talking informally about Madame Mao at a social gathering and making sketches in what became known as Taiwan in the years before the revolution (that’s right, he did not have the gift of clairvoyance). Of course, the Red Guards hardly needed a pretext to arrest and torture anyone during the Cultural Revolution. His secret, nonpolitical art was more than sufficient. Filmmakers Francesco Bello & Timothy Sternberg coaxed the late artist into reflecting on his life and work in the elegantly elegiac short documentary Dreaming Against the World (trailer here), a Motion Picture Institute (MPI) supported film that screens during this year’s DOC NYC.

Mu Xin was born into a well to do family in Wuzhen, so he was doomed to face hardships during Mao’s various ideological campaigns. However, his early years were also greatly enriched by the extensive library a local intellectual left in his family’s care. Frankly, Mu Xin was better read in classic Western literature than any of us, which would hardly help his case during the Cultural Revolution, but it gave him perspective.

Although Mu Xin was a reluctant interview subject, he radiates dignity and erudite charm. Obviously, the episodes he warily speaks of were difficult to revisit, but he also seems to experience some cathartic release from the process. Yet, he is extraordinarily Zen-like referring to the scores of paintings, poems, plays, and other writings confiscated and destroyed during the collective insanity as mere “practice.”

For those who doubt the Communist experience immeasurably impoverished the world, Mu Xin’s lost work is conclusive proof. He is now best known for “Tower Within a Tower” series of landscape paintings and his secretly recorded Prison Notes, sixty six pages of such minute lettering, they are recognized as a work of art in their own right, as well as a courageous act of defiance. Still, one has to wonder what treasures would also be celebrated had they survived.

As Bello & Sternberg rightly point out, Mu Xin could have been summarily executed had his signature works been discovered while he was creating them. It is an incredible story, told with tremendous sensitivity. The filmmakers add just enough context to ensure any viewer can appreciate Mu Xin’s life and work, without getting sidetracked by the nightmarish historical dynamics at play. Several of the credited translators are also names we recognize and therefore give us even further confidence in the film’s accuracy and integrity. It is a film worthy of its accomplished and insightful subject. Very highly recommended, the thirty-five minute Dreaming Against the World screens before Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah this Thursday (11/19) at the SVA Theatre, as part of DOC NYC 2015.

Wolf Totem: The Cultural Revolution Comes to Inner Mongolia

The land will be befouled and God’s creatures will be senselessly slaughtered. This is not England during the Industrial Revolution or America amid the Reagan Revolution. It is China in full throes of the Cultural Revolution. As they witness the consequences first-hand, two formerly eager volunteers will be deeply disillusioned by the Party’s ruinous policies in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Wolf Totem (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

When they first arrive, cadres Chen Zhen and Yang Ke really believe they will be making a difference for the hardscrabble herders of Inner Mongolia. However, they quickly learn to respect the power of nature, especially the danger and beauty of the regions’ wolves. They also cannot miss the bad vibes radiating off the local party boss, Bao Shunghi. However, they manage to settle in with their ethnic Mongolian hosts rather nicely, especially considering the condescending nature of their assignment.

Frankly, they learn more from the herders than vice versa. After a too-close-for-comfort encounter with a wolf pack, Chen Zhen becomes increasingly fascinated with the Eurasian Wolves. He cannot shake the idea they deliberately spared him. Therefore, he is increasingly appalled by Bao’s cruel bounties on wolves, to pave the way for the locust-like settlers. He is also threatening the nomadic herders’ traditional way of life by despoiling their grassland for his developments. Seeing the wolves’ numbers dwindling, Chen Zhen does something rash. He secretly adopts an orphaned wolf cub. Yet, it is immediately clear the young wolf will always be too wild to live among people, but might become too domesticated to survive in nature.

Do not take this as a joke: it is frankly amazing what expressive performers these wolves are on the big screen. Lead training Andrew Simpson raised 35 region-appropriate wolves especially for the film—and the camera absolutely loved them. Even with extensive safety measures in place, Feng Shaofeng did not escape injury working closely with the wolves, but it was probably worth it. The co-star of White Vengeance and The Golden Era gives probably his career best performance as Chen Zhen. Once again, Shawn Dou is stuck playing second banana, but he keenly expresses the bitter nature of their hard lessons learned. Yin Zhusheng also makes a perfectly odious yet charismatic villain as Bao. Regardless, nobody will ever upstage those wolves.

It is a not-so minor miracle this adaptation of Lu Liamin’s autobiographical novel (written as Jiang Rong) was ever made, especially considering Annaud was banned from China for years following Seven Years in Tibet. The explicit environmental themes and only slightly more muted critiques of the Cultural Revolution are also third-rail kind of subjects for the state film authorities. Nevertheless, they not only lifted Annaud’s ban and helped underwrite the production, they also chose Totem as China’s official foreign language Academy Award submission. Clearly, they are playing to win rather than score PR points with a non-existent international audience, as they often have in the past. Big and sprawling, with a green conscience, Totem is an Academy-friendly film, in nearly every way.

It also happens to be a very good film, which is a nice bonus for the rest of us. Totem offers more striking proof of why Annaud is considered the best contemporary narrative filmmaker working with animal and natural subjects. Cinematographer Jean-Marie Dreujou captures all the wolves’ twitchy power as well as the stunning beauty of the surrounding vistas. The late great James Horner’s reputation will also be further burnished by what is sadly one of his final scores. Few composers could produce such sweeping themes that are still so distinctive and evocative of a film’s time and place. It is an aesthetic marvel and one of the best environmental films in decades, precisely because it makes deeply compelling spiritual and cultural connections to the threatened Mongolian ecosystem. Very highly recommended, Wolf Totem opens this Friday (9/11) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home

Most ballets tell tragic stories, but the Maoist-era Red Detachment of Women caused them. It certainly contributed to the woes of Lu Yanshi’s family during the Cultural Revolution. Their wounds will never fully heal, even when he is finally “rehabilitated” and released from his prison camp in Zhang Yimou’s straight-up masterpiece Coming Home (trailer here), which opens this Wednesday in New York.

Lu Yanshi was a college professor—and therefore a class enemy during the Gang of Four’s reign of terror. Further compounding his guilt, Lu escaped from his labor camp, finding the half-starved life of a fugitive more bearable. Naturally, the Communist Party responded by pressuring his family. Lu’s wife Feng Wanyu will bear any risk to protect him, but their daughter Dan Dan has absorbed too much of the omnipresent propaganda. She is a gifted ballet dancer, but she could very well lose the lead role in Red Detachment of Women she has worked so hard to win. Convinced to inform on her father, she learns the hard way what sort of opportunities are available to the children of traitors.

Gaining nothing, Dan Dan’s relationship with her mother is nearly irreparably poisoned. Unfortunately, the years Feng spends separated from Lu are not kind to her. By the time he is released, Feng is already suffering from mild dementia. Due to some cruel form of amnesia, she is unable to recognize Lu. Worse still, she sometimes mistakes her distraught husband for the predatory Officer Fang, who used Lu’s safety to extort sexual favors from Feng, like any good Communist would. However, Lu quickly reconciles with his deeply remorseful daughter.

If you think there is a better performance to be seen in a film this year than Gong Li’s turn-for-the-ages as Feng, you either have profoundly faulty aesthetic judgement or were simply even more struck by the achingly poignant dignity of Chen Daoming’s Lu. Watching Lu as Feng unknowingly tells him about himself is more devastating than a thousand Old Yellers getting shot. What they are doing is actually very complicated. They are playing scenes with each other in the moment, but also with each characters’ ghosts from the past. Yet they pull it off brilliantly. It is their work that leaves a lump in your throat, but Zhang Huiwen is still quite touching as the disillusioned Dan Dan—and also convincingly graceful in her dance scenes.

Frankly, Coming Home is not trying to be a political film, because the terrible implications of the Cultural Revolution need no belaboring. They are ever-present and inescapable. Instead, it is an exquisite tragedy, rendered with incredible sensitivity and humanism. Zhang has gone big with epics like House of Flying Daggers and made Fifth Generation-defining classics with Gong Li, like Red Sorgum and The Story of Qiu Ju, but with the perfectly balanced Coming Home he expresses the pain and confusion of hundreds of thousands of families on a painfully intimate canvas. If you only see one film this year, you want it to be Coming Home. Very highly recommended, it opens this Wednesday (9/9) in New York, at the Angelica Film Center downtown and the Lincoln Plaza uptown.

Chinese Realities: Though I Am Gone

Wang Qingyao’s words have an eerie resonance.  He is determined that his wife’s murder during the Cultural Revolution will not be denied or forgotten by the guilty and embarrassed parties.  Despite his personal pain, he documented his family’s tragedy with remarkable thoroughness.  It is an acutely personal story, but one with national significance for China that unfolds in Hu Jie’s Though I Am Gone (trailer here), which screens during MoMA’s Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions film series.

During the Cultural Revolution, Beijing schools were the incubators of the institutionalized insanity.  Unfortunately, Wang’s wife was a middle school vice principal in the wrong city, at the wrong time.  When the Red Guards began terrorizing the country, their children followed their lead.  Even though Bian considered herself a loyal Communist since before 1946, she was forced to endure physical beatings and public humiliations on a daily basis.  Fearing for her family’s safety, Bian resigned herself to the torments.  One day, the students took it too far and rather than taking her to the hospital literally one block away, they just threw her out like a sack of garbage.

Her husband was not on hand to witness the torture she endured.  It only would have made things worse for her.  However, the trained journalist photographed her battered body and saved evidence of her ordeal, including the blood and excrement soaked clothes she wore during her final hours.  Years later, an anonymous source came forward to give him an exact accounting of the events.  Not surprisingly though, only Bian’s fellow victims agreed to participate in Hu’s documentary.

As a filmmaker, Hu’s approach is as simple and straight forward as it can be.  Even eschewing soundtrack music, he focuses his camera on Wang and his photographs, allowing the man to tell her story in his own words.  He also incorporates archival recordings of the state sanctioned madness as well as personal testimony from Bian’s colleagues.

Speaking of the need to bear witness, Wang Qingyao echoes sentiments often heard in Holocaust survivors’ oral histories.  When he eventually produces a photo of the smoke coming from the chimney of the crematorium where his wife’s remains were incinerated, the symmetry becomes profoundly unsettling.  While Hu maintains an intimate focus on Bian’s story, he masterfully conveys a sense of how truly representative it was of rampant, widespread horrors.

On a technical level, Though I Am Gone is a simple film, but it is emotionally devastating.  This is an incredibly brave expose of events the Party would prefer to forget.  Highly recommended for general audiences, particularly including middle school aged students, Though I Am Gone (also distributed by dGenerate Films) screens this coming Tuesday (5/28) and the following Saturday (6/1) as part of Chinese Realities at MoMA.

11 Flowers: A Difficult Era to Come of Age

Wang Han should not be growing up in the countryside.  Whether they like it or not, his parents were forced to relocate to Guizhou province as part of the Cultural Revolution’s Third Front campaign.  For an active eleven year old boy, it is not such a bad environment.  However, he has an unusual vantage point to observe the struggles of another “intellectual” family in Wang Xiaoshuai’s 11 Flowers (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

Frankly, Wang Han’s father is fortunate to have a job with an out-of-town opera company, but it requires spending extensive time away from home.  Each time he commutes to work, he accompanies Wang Han part of the way to school.  It is an important ritual that cements their bond.  Wang Han does not share a similar bond with his stern factory worker mother.  When chosen to be the leader of his school’s morning calisthenics (part of their daily Maoist regimen), Wang Han’s principal rather insensitively tells the boy to ask for a new shirt for the occasion.  Of course, this would be a considerable investment in money and cloth ration vouchers for the family.  Nonetheless, his mother eventually relents.

For a brief period, life is good for Wang Han, but the discovery of a dead body is an ill omen, as is the conspicuous distress experienced by Jue Hong, his frequently absent crush.  While his family has largely avoided trouble, her “intellectual” father, Xie Fulai, has not.  Nor has she.  Evidently, the dead man raped the young girl, as her brother the killer explains to Wang Han, when circumstances bring them together in the forest.  It is a frightening meeting for the eleven year old, made considerably worse when the fugitive forcibly takes his new shirt.

It might be overstating matters to describe the semi-autobiographical 11 Flowers as the late Cultural Revolution era version of To Kill a Mockingbird, but it gives a general sense of what to expect from the coming of age story.  Wang focuses on the personal, but the political periodically intrudes in rudely menacing ways.  Through Wang Han’s eyes, the Cultural Revolution is not so much an exercise in ideological excess, but the periodic explosion of street thuggery, as when his father is caught in a Red Guard rampage.

Liu Wenqing is a remarkably expressive young actor, who perfectly anchors the film.  He makes Wang Han’s slow evolution from innocence to awakened conscience quite riveting and moving.  Likewise, the young supporting cast-members are spot-on as his classmates.  Yet, the subtle power of Wang Jingchun’s work as his father really sneaks up on audiences.  When he encourages Wang Han’s painting as a means of artistic freedom, it feels light and natural at the time, but it is hugely significant in retrospect.

11 Flowers is unusually sensitive and accomplished.  It is probably the best film to focus on a youthful cast since Tom Shu-yu Lin’s Starry Starry Night, which was probably the best since who knows what?  Beautifully lensed by Dong Jinsong, it is quality cinema on every level.  Highly recommended, 11 Flowers opens today (2/22) in New York at the Quad Cinema downtown and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center uptown.

DF ’13: China Concerto

Something as profoundly traumatic as the Cultural Revolution cannot simply be papered over.  It hangs over the national psyche, like a malevolent ghost.  As much as it embraces globalism and crony capitalism, the excesses of the Mao years still have a bearing on the present day China.  Indeed, it is part of the internal contradictions Bo Wang analyzes in his documentary-essay China Concerto (trailer here), which screens as part of MoMA’s 2013 Documentary Fortnight.

A film of observation and rumination, Concerto has a pseudo-epistolary structure, featuring a woman’s disembodied voice reading a man’s dispatches from China.  The writer is not a passive viewer, having trained himself to dissect imagery and look for the telling details nobody is supposed to notice.  He is in the right place for it.  Aside from the movie clips and newscast excerpts incorporated for illustrative purposes, Concerto was almost entirely shot in Chongqing, the China’s version of Chicago.  While Bo Wang was shooting, Bo Xilai’s neo-Maoist “Red Culture” campaign was in full swing, but the Chongqing party secretary would soon be removed after the Wang Lijun scandal brought international media attention to rumors of extensive corruption.

 He certainly captured images that are both striking and ironic.  Perhaps his richest vein of material is the park where viewers witness couples dancing under a model of Mount Rushmore and an elderly man reclining near a Statue of Liberty.  Yet, tucked away, there is also a cemetery dedicated exclusively to Red Guards that remains padlocked and shunned.  According to the woman’s tantalizingly vague narration, it seems many of those interned were involved in an incident of cannibalism, which has since been consigned to the memory hole.  One suspects this park could easily be the subject of an entire documentary feature.

It is absolutely fascinating to watch Concerto apply the techniques of deconstruction to official state propaganda.  The stand-in for the filmmaker’s stand-in explicitly argues China’s obsession with spectacle is intended to mask and empower it Communist rulers.  It also offers trenchant analysis of the capitalism promoted by the state, a mutation described as “collective capitalism,” in contrast to the western individualistic variety.  The implications for the individual in Chinese society are obvious.  That is one reason the correspondent always focuses on a single individual when watching sprawling propaganda pageants.

Indeed, Concerto’s concern for the overwhelmed individual is rather noble, in a genuinely subversive way.  As if its indie bona fides needed more burnishing, China Concerto holds the distinction of being a selection of the 2012 Beijing Independent Film Festival, which was shutdown not once, but three times by the government.  This is a film that simply encourages audiences to think, but some might find that threatening.  Highly recommended for sophisticated viewers, China Concerto screens during MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight this Wednesday (2/20) and Thursday (2/21), with the director present for Q&A both nights.  For Georgians, it also screens March 27^th at Kennesaw State and March 28^th at Emory, as part of the well curated Independent Chinese Film Series.

Mulberry Child: A Family Survives the Cultural Revolution

Paradoxically, it might have been the ardent loyalty of Jian Ping’s persecuted parents that saved them during the Cultural Revolution.  At least, they never said anything incriminating their children would have been forced to repeat.  Yet, the lingering trauma of the experience makes it difficult for her to relate to her Americanized daughter, Lisa Xia.  By exploring their family history, the two women come to terms with their own relationship in Susan Morgan Cooper’s hybrid-documentary, Mulberry Child (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York at the Quad Cinema.

True believers, Hou Kai and Gu Wenxiu met and married through the Chinese Communist Party.  They bought into the Party’s early rhetoric, which proved to be a profound mistake during the “Anti-Rightist Campaign.”  Trying to defend a wrongfully accused colleague, Hou only succeeded in putting himself in the Party’s crosshairs.  Despite some trying moments, Jian’s father made it through the first reign of terror, demoted but relatively unscathed.  The Cultural Revolution would be a different story entirely.

As a school administer, Jian’s mother was directly in the line of fire.  To make matters worse, her father’s history as a one-time Japanese POW was a red flag for the empowered zealots.  As the institutionalized madness escalated, Jian’s father was imprisoned and her mother was held a de-facto captive in her school’s boiler room, forced to write self-criticism and pressured to denounce her husband.  Largely raised by their grandmother, the children went months without seeing either parent.

How cowardly and cruel must an ideology be that it would force a seven year old girl to condemn her father in school?  Yet, the Maoist cult continues to seduce Western academics who never had to live through it.  Somehow though, Jian’s parents still cling to their faith, as if by acknowledging the source the horror they lived through—the Chinese Communist Party—would make all their suffering for naught.

Jian and her daughter can apprise the past with more clarity, but they remain susceptible to a romanticized vision of contemporary China.  Ironically, their big coming together moment happens during the Beijing Olympic Games, against the backdrop of the striking Bird’s Nest stadium, designed by Ai Weiwei.  Yet, the government’s relentless campaign against the artist and teacher ought to undermine the superficial images the Party tries to present to the world.

Nonetheless, when looking backward, Mulberry is quite forceful and moving.  Combining Jacqueline Bisset’s voice-overs with dramatized episodes from Jian’s memoir, Morgan Cooper vividly conveys an innocent child’s perspective on an era of state sanctioned insanity.  Jody Choi and Bruce Akoni Yong are particularly affecting as young Jian and the much abused Hou (“The Big Traitor”), respectively.  However, the candid-style mother-daughter conversations do not carry the same dramatic weight.  Yes, there is something universal to their generational disconnect, but it pales in comparison to her experience visiting her father in prison—unaccompanied because only a seven year old girl could visit a suspected enemy of the state without reprisals.

Of course, the difficulties survivors like Jian have expressing affection are the least of the Cultural Revolution’s tragic legacy, but it is what most directly affects her and her daughter.  Sensitively produced, Mulberry Child is recommended for its up-close-and-personal insight into the chaos unleashed by Mao’s regime (rather than its wishful thinking for today’s China) when it opens this Friday (9/7) at New York’s Quad Cinema.

Docu-memoir: Fengming

In his latest documentary, Wang Bing only uses one camera, which he hardly ever moves. Rather than dazzle the audience with dramatic cinematography and rapid-fire edits, he focuses like a laser beam on his subject, He Fengming, as she tells her traumatic life story, simply and directly for Wang’s camera, in Fengming: a Chinese Memoir. Opening this Friday in New York at the Anthology Film Archives, it is an intensely personal film which takes on truly epic dimensions.

For those who persist in idolizing Mao, this film will come as an uncomfortable corrective. While He Fengming certainly suffered during the Cultural Revolution, which Mao apologists prefer to blame solely on the Gang of Four, her troubles began in 1957, with the advent of his Anti-Rightist Campaign. She had considered herself an ardent and loyal Communist, who had voluntarily withdrawn from college to serve the Party’s Lanzhou newspaper. Yet she still found herself on the receiving end of their so-called “struggle sessions” when she refused to denounce her husband, Wang Jingchao. His crime was to believe the rhetoric of the previous Hundred Flowers Campaign and subsequently publish an essay critical of the corrupt government bureaucracy. This mistake would directly lead to the incarceration of both husband and wife in work camps, and ultimately result in his premature death.

One of the greatest tragedies of Fengming is how badly she and Wang wanted to believe in the Party, despite its accusations and abuse. While they had the option of forestalling their “rehabilitation,” both were eager to regain the Party’s good graces as soon as possible. Ruefully she observes: “That’s how simple we were. If I’d known how it would end, I’d have never let him go to that camp—it was a death sentence.” As an alleged ringleader of the mythical “Rightists,” Wang was sentenced to the western sounding Dry Gulch work camp, one of the worst of the worst. As a lesser conspirator in the fabricated “Black Clique,” she was sent to the comparatively survivable Number 10 Collective Farm outside of Anxi.

By 1960, rumors of famine at Dry Gulch reached He Fengming. Knowing the Anti-Rightist Campaign was on its way out the Party cadres surprised her by granting her request to visit to her husband. She proceeds to describe her arduous journey, enduring extreme elements in hopes of bringing him emergency provisions. Of course, the audience has an ominous feeling how it will end. In its infinite magnanimity, the Party eventually declared her and her fellow alleged Rightists “rehabilitated” in 1961, only to force her to repeat her ordeal again a few years later during the Cultural Revolution.

Filmed in long continuous shots, interrupted only for restroom breaks or to turn up the lights, Fengming resembles Holocaust oral histories, both in terms of style and horrific subject matter. Ambitious in its truth-telling rather than its filmmaking, Wang’s documentary requires an audience with a well-developed attention-span. Those who can acclimate to its visual sparseness will find Fengming heartbreaking and absorbing, as it chronicles a genuine love story cut short by runaway ideology. Fengming is an important cinematic document, highly recommended for intelligent audiences. It begins a limited three day run at AFA this Friday.