SIGNALS — HIDDEN HISTORIES China revealed


Screening work from world-renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and a range of documentary-makers, Rotterdam’s Hidden Histories offers a revealing insight into the more marginal sides of China’s economic miracle. Leon Forde reports


The International Film Festival Rotterdam will highlight previously unseen aspects of Chinese society in Hidden Histories, a themed programme for 2012 in the festival’s main Signals section. Hidden Histories will screen films by Chinese documentary film-makers alongside work by the celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Compiled by programmers Gertjan Zuilhof and Gerwin Tamsma, the films in the section focus on aspects of Chinese society such as poverty, corruption and misrule.


“Independent documentary film-making has


probably been the strongest element in Chinese cinema in the last 10 years already,” explains Tamsma. “This year, when it became clear the conditions under which they can work and find an audience were worsening, we decided it was the right time to make a selection of this year’s best independent documentaries dealing with the more marginal sides of the Chinese economic miracle.” Tamsma adds that the discussion was


triggered by the cancellation of the Songzhuang Documentary Film Festival in China last year. Rotterdam has a long tradition of screening independent feature films, shorts and documentaries from China and has assisted some of these films through the Hubert Bals Fund. They include Wang Bing’s epic Tie Xi Qu: West Of The Tracks, which premiered at Rotterdam in 2003. Hidden Histories will screen eight feature documentaries and three short documentaries, as well as nine films from Ai Weiwei. The titles include


Xu Tong’s Shattered


Apuda, He Yuan’s film of the life of a carpenter and his dying father which won the main prize at Yunfest in China; Bachelor Mountain, a portrait of the uneasy friendship between a lumberjack and the women to whom he has taken a shine, the sequel to Yu Guangyi’s Survival Song which screened at Rotterdam in 2009; and Shattered, which follows those on society’s margins, the third film from Xu Tong, whose films Wheat Harvest and Fortune Teller both screened at Rotterdam. Tamsma explains the films share several


characteristics, including the fact they often have a very dramatic, shocking backbone and the film-makers are usually one-man operations doing everything themselves, often shooting digitally. “All the [Hidden Histories] films relate to the idea


Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale


of ‘changing China’, to the fact that not everybody is getting rich, that there is a lower class who face tough times, treated like waste or ignored altogether,” Tamsma explains. The work from Ai Weiwei — known for his criticism of the social and cultural changes in China — includes five films referred to by the artist as “social documentaries” and four documentary art videos. His work in Hidden Histories includes two world premieres: Ordos 100 documents site visits for a project that invited 100 architects to each design a villa to be built in a new community in Inner Mongolia; and So Sorry, a sequel to the artist’s Disturbing The Peace, which investigates


Gertjan Zuilhof


Gerwin Tamsma


the students who died during the Sichuan earthquake. Other Ai Weiwei work in the section includes


Fairytale, which documents a 2007 project in which he invited 1,001 Chinese citizens to Germany to experience their own fairytale, and Beijing 2003, a 150-hour video work about the city and its people. “For Beijing 2003, he drove a car with a camera


through all the streets in the centre of Beijing, filming everything non-stop on the way,” explains Zuilhof. “It took them three weeks to complete and the video is no less than 150 hours long. “You cannot show this kind of art video in a


cinema. Instead of the usual gallery space for this kind of work, we will create a lounge café [called the Ai Weiwei Café] to show the videos, and invite other film-makers to show and discuss their work.”


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January 2012 International Film Festival Rotterdam 7 n


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