MCLC: Beijing Independent Film Fest survives

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin B Lee <kevin at dgeneratefilms.com>
Subject: Beijing Independent Film Fest survives
******************************************************

Source: dGenerate (8/30/13):
http://dgeneratefilms.com/uncategorized/the-beijing-independent-film-festiv
al-survives#more-10949

The Beijing Independent Film Festival Survives
By Lydia Wu

Note: The following report was written at the bequest of the Li Xianting
Film Fund, organizers of the Beijing Independent Film Festival, as a
statement of record on the proceedings of this year’s Festival.

The 10th Beijing Independent Film Festival opened on August 23, 2013, with
nearly 300 participants, including an assemblage of directors,
journalists, audiences, programmers and film scholars who are interested
in the Chinese independent filmmaking circle. Before the opening of the
BIFF, the organizers had been negotiating with local authorities who would
not allow any unsanctioned collective cultural events to happen. The
authorities had given notice to the organizers that there was no
possibility to hold their festival in Beijing. After a tedious and
time-consuming negotiation, both the police and the organizers finally
reached an agreement that the opening ceremony could take place in Fanhall
(a cafe and multipurpose cultural space run by the Li Xianting Film Fund,
which is also the sponsor of the BIFF).

On the surface, the opening was different from the scene last year, when
policemen in plainclothes showed up to restrict the numbers of attendees
and a mysterious power cut disrupted the opening screening, leaving
festivalgoers outside waiting for several hours.  The opening ceremony
went smoothly this year, from the guest registration and opening speech to
the gathering of directors and guests. But the opening screening didn’t
proceed. Under pressure from authorities, the festival couldn’t give a
clear announcement of what would happen next.

Attendees went from Fanhall to Li Xianting (LXT) Film Fund, waiting
outside the Film Fund’s brand new three-story office and screening complex
for nearly two hours, hoping that the opening screening could happen. In
the meantime, Festival Operations Director Zhang Qi took one last chance
with police to negotiate the possibility of showing the opening film,
while another plain-clothes policeman came into the LXT Film Fund to
persuade Li Xianting to dismiss the festival attendees. Festival Artistic
Director Wang Hongwei received a phone call from the police who told him
there were two coach buses waiting outside the Foundation. They were the
same buses that took away the students of the Li Xianting Film School when
authorities briefly detained students and shut down the school a month ago.

Considering the safety of all the attendees, as well as the safekeeping of
media kept within the Li Xianting Film Fund, the organizers decided not to
continue with screenings, which might provoke the police and trigger
unwanted trouble. To address the emergency and give an explanation to
attendees, the festival handed out DVDs of all the films on the programme
to the approved directors and invited guests, suggested that they watch
the films in groups, and that they would organize post-screening
discussions as scheduled. Although this alternative plan guaranteed that
all the directors could watch films, exchange ideas and support each
other, it excluded public audiences who came all the way to the outskirts
of Beijing to watch independent films. As the scheduled public screenings
could not take place, festivalgoers gradually left. The following day some
media outlets started spreading the news of the shutdown or cancellation
of BIFF online.

This is the first year that the BIFF attempted to expand the activities of
the festival on a national level, through collaboration with cinephile
clubs in downtown Beijing, Chengdu, Tianjin and Shenzhen to hold the
festival simultaneously. These cinephile clubs have nurtured their own
audiences, which would enable the BIFF to reach a greater public audience
in urban areas across China.  The venues could also share the weight of
the festival by dispersing the potential gathering in Songzhuang, thus
addressing the unease of local police over public assembly. Unfortunately,
this attempt was also disrupted, as the cinephile clubs were threatened by
their local police, except for the ones in Shenzhen and Tianjin. On the
day before BIFF was due to start, three cinephile clubs cooperating with
BIFF in Beijing announced the cancellation of their screenings. The
screenings in Shenzhen considered dropping the BIFF label from their event.

BIFF never stopped trying other strategies to make the festival run
smoothly despite the potential danger they might suffer. The festival’s
second day coincided with a retrospective of films by Yang Jin, organized
by Fanhall. The festival’s would-be attendees were told to attend the
screening of Yang Jin’s Don’t Expect Praises in Fanhall. Then BIFF
organizers then decided to use Yang’s film (which is an official
state-approved production) in Fanhall as a cover to simultaneously screen
the festival’s opening film Around That Winter (directed by Wang Xiaozhen)
in the LXT Film Fund’s brand new video hall.  The opening screening and
discussion ran successfully both in Fanhall and LXT without any official
intervention. During the post-screening discussion Yang Jin announced to
the audience, ”A film festival cannot be called film festival if there’s
no screenings at all. This is the opening film Around That Winter which
was supposed to be seen yesterday.” In other words, the festival was not
shut down; it had officially rolled out.

It is difficult to fathom the bottom line of the authorities. The backup
plan at the opening screening and the screenings on the next day serve to
test the degree of official tolerance. Although the cancellation of the
opening screening on the first day resulted in a weak turnout over the
remaining days of the festival, it definitely relieved the tension from
the authorities, which helped all the screenings, discussions and forums
run smoothly as scheduled.

The line-up of this year’s edition consisted of 22 fictions, 30
experimental films, 35 documentaries, the special program “Inside Iran,”
and a special program of films from Indonesia. The pan-Asian programming
vision is one of the highlights of the festival. The Iranian director
Nahid Persson and curator Amirali Gassemi were both present to exchange
ideas with Chinese indie filmmakers, and the forum “The Cross-Asian
Independent Film” focused on communication between Asian independent
cinemas. The other three forums were: “The Work of the Film Auteur”;
“Future Cinema: Moving Image in Contemporary Asia”; and ”From Film to
Contemporary Art: The Publication Plan of Li Xianting Film Fund”, which
announced the launch of new books edited by Li Xianting Film Fund.

The awards of the 10th Beijing Independent film Festival will be announced
at a gala ceremony on August 31st.

Lydia Wu is a doctoral candidate in film studies at Newcastle University,
currently researching independent film festivals in China.