The New Yorker on Ghost Town

At the New Yorker online, China correspondent Evan Osnos writes about the Chinese independent film and the New York premiere of Zhao Dayong’s Ghost Town.

Visitors to the New York Film Festival on Sunday got to see “Ghost Town” a three-hour observational documentary by Zhao Dayong about a village left behind by China’s boom. The starkness and raw intensity of the film is a fine example of the new generation of independent documentary, which I mentioned, but did not explore much, in my Profile earlier this year of the filmmaker Jia Zhangke. On the spectrum of Chinese filmmakers, Jia used to be the vanguard, but, in a measure of how hard it is to fix a definition for independence and coöptation in a place like China, Jia is now considered too mainstream by some Chinese fans (especially after his decision to withdraw from an Australian festival in order to avoid appearing beside Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled Uighur leader whom the Chinese government has accused of instigating the recent riots in Xinjiang).
In a good piece in the Times on Friday, Kirk Semple highlights this new breed of independents. I also noticed this quote from Zhao Dayong: “I feel very frustrated,” Mr. Zhao said. “I’m a Chinese filmmaker, and of course my audience should be the Chinese people, especially since my films are about ordinary working Chinese people.” He added, “That would be more valuable than winning an international film festival.”

Those words could have come from the mouth of Jia Zhangke a decade ago. It made me wonder if he is struggling with the same issues that Jia once confronted: How can you be relevant to a Chinese audience if it can’t see your films? How much cooperation with the state, for the sake of distribution, is too much cooperation?

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