TIFF ’14: I Am Here

First Morgan Spurlock signs on for the One Direction back-stagey doc and now Lixin Fan, the director of the gritty, class conscious Last Train Home, turns his lens on the Chinese reality show Super Boy. In truth, they are really not the same kind of project. Granted, anyone with a smidge of familiarity with sing-offs like Idol will immediately get Super Boy, but the Chinese show is a bit more exploitative than its Western cousins (shocker, right?). Fan captures of a season’s worth of drama fly-on-the-wall style in I Am Here (a.k.a. No Zuo No Die, trailer here), which screens during the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

Right from the start, Fan counts down the days until the Super Boy finale. The principle is basically the same as any other talent show, but some rounds feature contestants challenging each other in head to head duels. Yet, none of the Super Boys has much taste for going mano a mano. Since they live together sequestered from the outside world in the Super Boy training complex, the impressionable youths form strong bonds over time. As a result, they seem more likely to sacrifice themselves than administer the coup de grace to a friend and competitor.

Arguably, the neurotic nature of the Super Boys might be part of the draw. They sound okay in performance (at least from what we hear), but the coaches are often frustrated when viewer popularity trumps a superior performance. Yes, life is not fair in reality television.

It is difficult to make hard and fast judgments about the adult supervision on Super Boy. Sometimes the coaches act like martinets and the judges can be bizarrely unprofessional. Frankly, breakout Super Girl contestant Zeng Yike comes across as a much more intriguing figure during her brief screen time than any of the Super Boys Fan follows. At one point, a judge summarily quit on-air when she passed through to the next round. Since then, she has generated considerable media attention for her striking but somewhat androgynous style.

In fact, despite all the behind-the-scenes time the audience gets with the current crop of Super Boys, Fan never really establishes their discrete personalities to any meaningful degree. Considering how many of them wear similarly twee Harry Potter spectacles and hipster couture, it is easy to mix them up.

True, the Super Boy franchise frequently resembles a factory, but not one as soulless as those the subjects of Last Train Home toil in. Perhaps a decade ago, the extent to which the Super Boys live in a web-streamed fishbowl might have been shocking, but now it is sort of business as usual.

Indeed, the entire documentary might be old news for Super Boy fans by now. For Americans, it offers an intriguing look at Chinese media, but Fan’s approach is rather betwixt-and-between. At times, he captures some warts-and-all reality show reality, but there are also many fannish Hard Day’s Night interludes. Still, he certainly has an eye for visuals. Interesting but uneven, I Am Here is mostly recommended for hardcore China watchers and potential expats looking for some pop culture background when it screens again this Thursday (9/11) and Sunday (9/14) as part of this year’s TIFF.

Tribeca ’14: Misconception

Overpopulation is an issue that can turn an ostensive philanthropist into an evangelist for draconian controls on the unwashed masses. Should we be concerned about hordes of debased people waging global battles for increasingly scarce resources? Filmmaker Jessica Yu went into her latest project expecting to find a crisis but came away with the somewhat more nuanced perspective informing her self-referentially titled documentary Misconception (trailer here), which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

It was TED Talker Hans Rosling who first tempered Yu’s alarm and duly serves as Misconception’s guru. According to Rosling, 80% of the world’s population now live in countries with 2.5 child birthrates or less. As a result, global population growth has leveled off. The other 20% are still procreating at rates that would give Warren Buffet conniptions, but corresponding life expectancy also happens to be relatively low in those nations. That is all well and good, but if Yu really wanted to rock viewers’ worlds, she would have introduced them to the work of the late great Julian Simon.

The meat of Misconception consists of a triptych of disparate individuals whose lives have been shaped by population planning policies in some fashion. The first is by far the best. With the help of Chinese filmmaker Lixin Fan (director of Last Train Home and executive producer of China Heavyweight), Yu follows Bao Jianxin’s determined efforts to avoid becoming one of China’s “leftover men.”

The implementation has been severe, but the One Child policy has curtailed China’s birthrate dramatically. Yet, it has come at an enormous social cost. Since boys are prized above girls, many couples opt for gender-specific abortions until they have a son. Like many of his “Little Emperor” generation, Bao faces an uphill challenge in his search for a wife. The numbers are simply against him. Yet, Bao also sabotages his best chance with a quite attractive old flame, because she cannot compete with Shu Qi in his favorite film, Love.

Frankly, Yu and company only scratch the surface of the potential social instability resulting from the One Child policy. Misconception also argues part of Bao’s problem is an increasing trend amongst Chinese women to choose careers over traditional family roles, but this too might partly be a function of the entitled attitudes fostered by “Little Emperor Syndrome.”

Perhaps the most loaded segment follows Denise Mountenay, a pro-life activist, who has found her calling lobbying against legalized abortion at the UN. At least she is from Canada, because in most other respects she fits the least charitable stereotype of Evangelical Christians. She is a hard charger, who has had her share of horrific experiences and undoubtedly means well, but she does not serve her cause well on-screen.

Contrasting with the ideological charge of the second segment (clearly heightened by deliberate editing choices), the third POV figure is easily the safest. Journalist Gladys Kalibbala does her best to heighten awareness of the staggering numbers of abandoned Ugandan street orphans, humanizing them in profiles and trying her best to re-connect them with extended family members. It is a noble response to a tragic situation.

There is at least one misconception in Misconception. Essentially, Rosling argues fear of a third world population explosion will increase global warming are misplaced, because it is those who live in the developed world that use the most resources. Yes, but the most precipitous increase in fossil fuel consumption is expected in India and China as they pursue aggressive electrification policies (a worthy goal), at the lowest possible cost.

In fact, you can almost feel Misconception holding back, struggling to maintain some sort of class-conscious, environmentally orthodox message. Still, it is admirable Yu was willing to re-examine her assumptions to any extent. A radically mixed bag, the inconsistent Misconception includes provocative arguments and distracting noise in nearly equal measure. For those who closely follow the work of Yu and Fan, it screens again this Saturday (4/26) during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.