48th San Francisco International Film Festival Part 2

Although mainland director Tian Zhuang Zhuang is most famous for Blue Kite, one of the best films ever made in China that summed up the tragic years of political movements under communism, he first gained international recognition in late eighties for two earlier films, “On the Hunting Ground” and “Horse Thief”. Tian seems to have deep interest in China’s ethnic groups and the ways they survived in some of the harshest environments on this earth, and these two films used Mongolia and Tibet as the backgrounds where he applied many wide angle shots and slow pacing to bring out the bleak landscape and its human stories. It came as no surprise when he decided to make a documentary (Delamu) about the Tea Horse Trail, the highest caravan route that cuts through the edge of Tibetan plateau and down to the north India. Regardless of the spectacular scenes of snow peaks and rivers that run deep down in the gorges, the film really focused on the human stories that Tian uncovered along the road. Here he offered an ensemble of local characters of various ages and religions, which included a 104-year-old woman who recalled how she outlived two husbands and all the hardships, an aged pastor telling stories of missionaries and his own imprisonment, a Tibetan young man who shared a wife with his brother, and many more. In the end we realized that these people who seemed to be living so remotely also have to deal with the same problems as we do, struggling through love and loss and pain. And the larger history, such as the civil war between the nationalists and the communists, the religious cleansing after the republic, the Dalai Lama’s escape to India, and China’s rapid modernization, did not spare these common people either and is still constantly changing their lives.

Interesting enough, another film legend, Wener Herzog who was once one of the representatives for German New cinema, also made a new documentary (White Diamond) on an equally remote area, the Amazon jungle in Guyana. Herzog apparently also has some attachment to jungles. Aguirre, the wrath of the God, the film that brought him to the world fame, was shot entirely in jungles. But once again, even with all those breath-taking shots of canopy, waterfall, reptiles and flying swifts, the new film is really about humankind, about how human dreams and conquers the nature but nature forever holds its mystery. Herzog is drawn to human stories much as a scientist drawn to unsolved puzzles. He shows them in a specific setting and studies them as an anthropologist. In this film he followed a British aeronautic scientist named Dr. Dorrington who built small airship to fly through the jungles. Funny, self-deprecating, idealistic, sentimental, mistake-prone, Dr. Dorrinton by default became the perfect central character much of the film is based on.

There has been a lot of hype for Jia ZhangKe’s new film The World. It was hailed as the first “above-ground” film that was made by him through official channel in China after he already made three other underground films, all of which were critically-acclaimed festival favorites and firmly positioned him as one of the youngest film masters. But the film opened to box office disappointment in China. I personally think this is his best film. Using a world miniature theme park as the setting, the film slowly unfolds the story of two main characters, both of whom came to Beijing to look for opportunities from a provincial town. The fantasy and falsehood of the locale contrasts absurdly with the real struggles these small people face. Jia avoids quick sentimentality and tells the story with restrains only until the very end. His meticulous attention to details made these characters so real. Jia’s favorite actress Zhao Tao deserved an acting award for he excellent performance too!

I chose the Moroccan film “In Casablanca Angels don’t Fly” partly due to my own fond memory of Marrakech. How often do we ever see a Moroccan film anyway? It also tells the plights of migrant workers, and in this case, they are the Berbers who left their native villages to make money in Casablanca. The film followed three waiters who all worked in the same restaurant, although the three stories don’t quite fit together. One subplot that really stands out is a tear-jerker, but a good one. I only wished that the director could have focused on this single thread and elaborate more on the few characters, but in the end we only got a glimpse of them.

48th San Francisco Film Festival Part 1

It was exactly ten years since I first attended the San Francisco International Film Festival. Thanks to an old school acquaintance at the time, not only did I get a chance to chat with Jiang Wen on the back of my friend’s car (he was showing his directorial debut “In the Days of Sun”), I also happened to crush Joan Chen’s dinner party in her beautiful Pacific Heights house. I no longer remember any details of these encounters other than the arrogance of both celebrities. I could not blame them anyway. What would possibly make them curious about me?! I was then a Stanford geek who goofed away a lot of time in front of my VCR watching tapes after tapes of foreign films (checked out from our media library). I thought I would be able to talk about films with them, but little did I know what a stupid brat I was.

Since then I have been a loyal patron of this festival, devoting some of best sunny days in Kabuki within those two weeks. On weekends I could watch three in a day. Voyeuristic by nature, I enjoy escaping into these alien cultures and faraway landscapes. But I also tended to select films from directors I had heard about, or films that were in competition in Cannes or Berlin film festival, just to reduce the “miss” rate in these hit-and-miss gambles. Over the years, the ticket price also crept up, outpacing the inflation rate, but the number of films I watched did not decrease accordingly. As a film buff/snob, film festival is a ritual I need to hold on to.

By accident or by trend, my favorite three films from this festival are all from female directors. Clair Dennis, who always surprises audience with her unconventional styles, pulled another interesting film (The Intruder) together by constructing suspense, fragmentary scenes, and conflicting story lines. It leapt from French mountains to Pusan and ended up in Tahiti, following an old man with secret identities who went through some heart surgery and had some issue with his son (first we thought we saw the son, but in the later part he was looking for the son who was left in Tahiti). Clair seemed to have cut and paste the plot and deliberately made it inconsistent and baffling, but this freedom at will opens up all kinds of possibilities to create very atmospheric and spectacular scenes, with mysteries lurking behind. Like David Lynch’s “Moholland Drive”, the film can be interpreted in many ways, while the real theme remains elusive, or Claire may never have a clear one except for a set of ideas and moods and visual impressions. The film was not made to entertain. It aims to take you through a meandering global journey, through gorgeous landscapes, through tropical storms and winter blizzard, through uncommon events, through solitude and memory and pain and loss, through what is called life.

I watched Argentinean director Lurecia Martel’s first film “La Cienaga” in Castro Theatre a couple of years ago and still remember the opening scene vividly. She has the uncanny ability to frame the most ordinary scenes with full tension and suspense, and her characters tread through daily life as if they could step on landmines anytime. Once again she pulled the same tricks in her latest film “The Holy Girl”, and instead of using a rundown swimming pool, she put the characters in a hotel and around a thermal pool, where sounds echo and dilapidated interior harbors forbidden desires and wakening sexuality of girlhood. Lots of close-up shots and unsymmetrical camera angles are used effectively to observe all the nuances of the psychological changes. But the new film can’t measure up to her last one. The directing is flawless, but the story is narrowly-focused and too intimate study of the girlhood struggles. It lacks the broader appeal of her previous film, which gives more context and sense of places and time. 

Ever since Central Station and City of God came out, Brazil immediately brings to mind images of Samba and gangster fight and poverty of children to people’s mind. The new filmAlmost Brothers from another female director Luica Muratplays into these clichés but it is nevertheless another impressive endeavor to tap into the same fertile story ground of racial polarization, violence and political repressions. Film makers in Brazil, more than anywhere else in the world, feel obligated to portrait a society in chaos, either to fight injustice or to reveal the root of their alarming social problems. Murat herself has spent time in prison during the 70s and this film, although spanning through 50 years, really centered on the prison period. The two protagonists, one white and one black, grew up together from two different backgrounds and reunited briefly in the prison but eventually drifted apart. One would wonder how a female director can make a film about male prison, where machismo is on its ultimate extreme. But Murat proved that she could just do this job as well, with a toughness and cool-headedness that can rival a man.

Morning Sun

Cultural Revolution is probably one of the most misunderstood periods of Modern Chinese history that has been greatly simplified in Western eyes when it was frequently used as proof of brutality and failure of communism. Thanks to a handful films that made into the international scene (To name a few, Farewell My Concubine, Red Violin, Blue Kite and Xiu-Xiu), popular images of Cultural Revolution are often about red guards smashing cultural heritages or denouncing and torturing innocent elders. Within China itself although much have been written and said, few dared to break the party lines and give more thorough unbiased studies. As early as mid-eighties, Ba Jing, the most prominent literary figure in China, proposed to build a Culture Revolution museum to commemorate lost lives and lost innocence. Not surprisingly, the government never took it seriously.

Thirty years have passed and Cultural Revolution seems such a distant memory. China is already an entirely different country from what it used to be. Even if little research has been done, do we still need to bring back the old ghosts and all those painful memories when the country is currently rushing through a major capitalistic boom? If history does repeat itself, would something like Cultural Revolution ever happen again in China, or in any other countries? What lessons can we learn from such a large-scale manmade catastrophe? Morning Sun, a new film from Long Bow Group and funded partly by PBS, is an ambitious project aiming to answer some of these questions. In fact there is no better time to embark on a project about Cultural Revolution when enough time have passed so that we can discuss it more objectively and when some main witnesses and participants are still alive.

Carma Hinton, one of the three directors, was born to American parents in 1949 and grew up in Beijing. She left for America in 1971 and at one point studied history in Harvard. As so-called "the new generation born with the republic" and a member of "old three classes" (referring to the high school students graduating from 1965-1968, who made up for the majority of red guards and were sent down to countryside without college education), she witnessed all the twists and turns of the mass movement in the early phases. Her intimate knowledge and wide connection network made the film both informative and thought-provoking. Rare cameo interviews of major historical figures from that period, such as Luo XiaoHai (founder of Red Guards), Song BingBing, Mao’s secretary Li Rui and his daughter, Chairman Liu Shao Qi's widow and daughter, plus other thinkers and writers from that generation, were pieced together by propaganda film clips and documentary footages. Its attempt to dissect this movement from personal angles proved to be very rewarding to audience, giving the film an emotional charge when these characters seemed to have suffered, grieved and grown out with dignities.

I watched the film at Roxie two weeks ago. It made me cringe and cry and laugh. Although born in the end of Cultural Revolution and bearing little memory of its actual events, I am familiar with many of the propaganda film clips, songs and Mao’s quotations. The specific Mao’s paragraph where the film took its title from, was in my second grade textbook, and I probably have seen East is Red a million times. What struck me the most is the feverish passion and self-righteous attitude of the Red Guards. The rebellious spirit of the youth is universal, but it can be both destructive and constructive. Under the manipulation of the higher orders, the selfless dedication to a cause bettering the society could easily be derailed towards something sinister. Yet in the current time of extreme commercialism, we also feel nostalgic of the sanitized society and revolutionary spirits.

Mao was the central character of Cultural Revolution, during which a God-like worshipping of him reached the highest order. The film did not paint Mao as neither evil nor God. By the end of the film he came across as a very complex character, a brilliant political schemer who could ruthlessly destroy his foes while remaining a romanticist and peasant poet in his heart. That also explains why he was never so hated in China, and up to this day, he remains a symbol of good earthly omens. The movie suggested that Mao launched Cultural Revolution to purge people who were against him. But he did not stop there. His essential goal was a single-sighted social re-engineering, mobilizing millions and creating a senseless Utopian vision in this biggest country of the world. It proved to be more devastating and more dangerous than any power struggles.