MCLC: Beijing Besieged by Waste director interview

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kevin lee (kevin at dgeneratefilms.com)
Subject: Beijing Besieged by Waste director interview
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Beijing Besieged by Waste will screen at the Association for Asian
Studies (AAS) Film Expo, Friday March 16 2012 in the Sheraton Centre
Toronto, as part of the AAS Annual Meeting. Q&A session to follow.
Full schedule and details for the AAS Film Expo can be accessed here:
http://www.aems.illinois.edu/aas/2012/aas_films2012.html

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Source: Art Space in China:
http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/artspacechina/2012/03/besieged_by_waste_interview_
wi.html#more

Besieged by Waste, Interview with Director Wang Jiuliang
by Christen Cornell

In October 2008, photographer Wang Jiuliang began a project
investigating waste disposal in and around Beijing. Following the
trucks that collected his daily rubbish, he discovered eleven
large-scale refuse landfills scattered around the close suburbs of the
city, each one growing daily alongside the skyscrapers, housing
developments, and general urban boom that surrounded them.

Beyond this, Wang also uncovered an underground industry in which
rubbish was being removed from the inner city and taken to hundreds of
illegal dumpsites around the urban fringe. Here, people were making
their homes and their living, building houses from discarded
construction materials, wearing clothes they had gleaned in the trash,
and making their dinners from the city’s food scraps. They raised pigs
on leftover organic matter. Local shepherds brought sheep and cattle
to graze between the bottles and plastic bags.

The speed and scale of China’s development always makes for a
particularly shocking story, here easily interpreted as 'the dark
side' of China's economic miracle, which in many ways it is. However
the problem of junk is one shared by all consumer societies. To quote
Wang, ‘Many of us believe that we are completely disconnected from the
garbage we produce once it has left our sight. Few realize that their
garbage has not gone far ... ’

Shocked by what he had found, Wang developed his project into a
powerful documentary film called Besieged by Waste [垃圾围城], released in
2011 and now available for distribution through dGenerate Films. Shot
with both a photographer’s eye for aesthetics, and an activist’s
commitment to social change, the film is a striking reminder of the
inextricability of society and its trash.

CC: Could you tell me what sparked your interest in making this film?
Did you have a sense of where your rubbish ended up?

WJL: To be honest, before filming Besieged by Waste I had no idea
where my rubbish went. I’d lived in Beijing for five years and had
never asked myself that question. It was only after I took on this
project that I started to ask myself: Where does my rubbish go? And
the answers to that question were revealed in the process of filming.

At the beginning I just wanted to take a few pictures of some Beijing
rubbish dumps for a project I was working on at that time (a project
called Supermarket that is still ongoing now). These pictures were
just supposed to provide some background for that project, to look
into the current situation of waste disposal in Beijing, but then we
found ourselves exposed to something far beyond anything we could have
imagined. For one thing we didn’t expect there to be so many rubbish
dumps so close to Beijing. We also didn’t realise how significantly
this waste affected people’s lives.

But then we found ourselves confronted with all this information, and
that’s how I ended up spending three years on this project.


CC: One line that kept coming up in the film was that ‘no one could
answer my questions.’ It felt like you were asking questions that
nobody else had asked yet – that nobody even knew how to ask yet, let
alone answer.

WJL: This question of where my rubbish went confused me, but I think
my confusion was actually representative of that of many people. There
are so many questions that people don’t know how to answer, don’t know
how to ask – I think my bewilderment probably represents the
bewilderment of many others.

CC: I saw at the end of the film that it had some influence on
national policy. Could you tell me a bit more about that, and the
reaction in general to the film?

WJL: After the film came out it attracted a lot of media attention,
from all different places, but especially China’s biggest media
agency, Xinhua Media. They have this one particular thing called
Interior Reference [neican], which is a collection of writing or
information that is put together particularly for the highest-level
officials – and they included information about my film in one of
those Interior Reference reports.

At the time, the journalists from Xinhua Media told me that Premier
Wen Jiabao had spent a lot of time going over my film, reviewing the
information in it, and then he issued orders for local officers to
attend to the problem. These processes are top down so they’re very
fast and, only two or three months after the Interior Reference report
had been submitted to the top party leaders, they had already issued
policies. These policies were to deal with this problem of rubbish
disposal – the illegal sites and the mismanagement of the legal ones.
They dedicated 100 billion yuan for the next five to seven years to
the issue.

CC: Wow. That’s a fantastic result.

WJL: It was, and it was very comforting to me; it made me feel like my
work hadn’t been for nothing. By 2011, 80% of the dumps had been
closed or being dealt with. That’s a pretty big difference.

CC: Have you seen the American documentary film Gaslands by Josh Fox,
about coal gas seam mining, or ‘fracking’ in the United States? It’s
similar in the way it’s just one man and his camera exposing an
environmental problem of national scale.

WJL: I think I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t seen it.

CC: Your film and Gaslands are both evidence of how it’s possible to
make films like this today, cheaply and with digital technology, and
with distribution through the Internet you can reach a global
audience. There are a lot of people in China making these kinds of
guerrilla documentaries now, no?

WJL: I wouldn’t say there are a lot of us. [laughs] Censorship and
control of the media is still pretty strict in China, so independent
directors here are not as free as people might imagine. Especially
people willing to deal with sensitive subjects – there are very few
documentary makers like this. There aren’t many documentaries made
about environmental issues in China.

CC: So would you say you’re an optimist?

WJL: Of course I’m an optimist! If I were a pessimist I wouldn’t have
done what I did. It’s only because we have hope that we are still
striving.

Loutai Village in Songzhuang Township, Tongzhou District, Beijing
This site is close to the Beijing Capital International Airport. On
the bank of the pond there is garbage from airline companies. On the
water surface, there are many disposable slippers from airplanes.

CC: It’s interesting, your film is very political, but it’s also
highly cinematic. The beauty in that first scene of sunrise over the
dump, for example – you manage to find poetry in the filthiest of
places, the most abject of social problems.

WJL: I suppose that first and foremost I’m a photographer. I’ve been
working as a photographer for more than a decade, so perhaps it’s
almost a habit for me by now to try to make something look beautiful.
[laughs] And maybe especially because this is a difficult topic – it’s
hard to face or accept – so I try to present it in a way that makes it
easier to handle.

I want my audience to open their eyes. I want them to really see this
problem. And I want them to see the rubbish dumps against a bigger
backdrop – against the skyscrapers, against the fields and the rivers
– so that they can see also the connection these places have to the
broader environment and to our lives in general.

On the surface the film is about rubbish; that’s the ‘topic’. But what
I really want to investigate here is the problem of urbanisation,
because the problems of rubbish, the expansion of the city, increasing
population and consumerism are all connected. So in the end the film
is a reflection on this crazy expansion of the city, this mad pace of
urbanisation.

CC: Has making the film affected the way that you live? The choices
you make about what to eat, what to buy, etc.?

WJL: Making the film has made me think a lot about materiality – I’ve
completely reassessed my relationship with the material world. In the
past, a thing was just a thing to me, was just something to be used. I
was completely ignorant of the whole life cycle of an object. An
object had nothing to do with me.

After going so deeply into this project I’ve realised that recycling
is something very close to us – it’s part of our life, it surrounds us
– and that sooner or later our rubbish will come back and affect us.
So now when I go to a supermarket, or just generally in my daily life,
I’ll always be asking myself the question Where does this thing come
from? Why does it exist? Why do we abandon it? Where do we abandon it?
And what kinds of problems might that disposal cause?

When I see an object now I want to know it more completely and more
rationally.

CC: So to end, can you tell me a little more about the project you
mentioned at the beginning, the one called Supermarket 《超级市场》 which
kick-started the documentary and that you said you’re still working
on?

WJL: It’s also about rubbish and in some ways will be a sequel now to
Besieged by Waste. It’s going to be more of an art project though,
with pictures, an installation, exhibition and a documentary. What I’m
going to do is collect a whole lot of rubbish and replicate a
supermarket out of this trash. I’m going to create a supermarket of
waste.

CC: That’s an interesting play with the idea of value. At first glance
the supermarket will look totally familiar, until people realise that
it’s full of familiar junk. And the junk has come back to haunt them!

WJL: That’s right. I think the supermarket is a very representative
symbol of consumerism. On the one side you have the consumers, and I
think people feel very familiar with the concept of the supermarket,
but then what I want to do with the supermarket will be kind of
ironic. I want to use this to look further into the question of where
commercial products come from and the full life cycle of an object.
Through looking at the problem of rubbish critically, I want to
investigate the problems inherent in consumerism and capitalist
production.