MCLC: Yunnan Fest cancelled

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin B Lee <kevin at dgeneratefilms.com>
Subject: Yunnan Fest cancelled
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Source: China Media Project (4/9/13): http://cmp.hku.hk/2013/04/09/32527/

By David Bandurski | Posted on 2013-04-09

Cui Weiping (崔卫平), a well-known social critic and professor at the
Beijing 
Film Academy wrote on Sina Weibo today that the Yunnan Multi-Cultural
Festival <http://www.yunfest.org/>, one of the country’s most important
platforms for independent documentary film, has been shuttered by
authorities.

The forum, known as “YunFest,” was founded in 2003 by the BAMA Mountain
Culture Research Institute, an NGO supervised by the Yunnan Academy of
Social Sciences. The idea of the forum was to “become a platform of
discussion” between visual documentary filmmakers and artists from China
and the Mekong region.

The forum — called so because the “film festival” is a much more sensitive
matter to plan in China’s controlled media environment — is often attended
by at least a handful of international critics and festival
representatives. So the forum has also served as a crucial platform for
young Chinese indie filmmakers to get their films seen and recognized
internationally.

Cui Weiping wrote on Weibo <http://weibo.com/1422308692/zriQ3zFjU>:

“YunFest” Multicultural Visual Festival is an important platform for
independent documentary in China. It began in 2003 and has already gone on
for 10 years. This year it has been cancelled completely [by the
authorities]. Those of us who didn’t have time to cancel our tickets found
ourselves in Dali. We are able to sit together and talk about film but
unable to watch any films. On the surface the cancellation of a film forum
doesn’t seem to mean much, but put all of these situations together and it
amounts to the suppression of all space for cultural exploration and the
killing of our country’s soft power.

“YunFest has always been a special cultural space,” film director Feng
Xiaohua (冯晓华) wrote <http://weibo.com/2491445615/zrjzeznWo>.

Cui Weiping added: “Making us stay in our hotel rooms so that we can’t
screen films together may look for the moment like stability. But who will
take responsibility for the longer term impact on cultural creativity and
spiritual life that this strangling of individuals has?”