[Editor’s Note: LFM is currently covering a series of provocative films debuting this week and next at The Los Angeles Film Festival.]
By Joe Bendel. For China, the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province on May 12, 2008 has been like Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill combined. It has laid bare public corruption and put the local and national authorities on the defensive. Like Katrina, it has also been widely documented in films like the Oscar nominated short China’s Unnatural Disaster and Du Haibin’s feature 1428 (the winner of the 66th Venice Film Festival’s Best Documentary Award), which screens tonight at 8:00pm at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival. See the trailer below.
At 14:28 hours (2:28 pm) China was hit with what is considered the nineteenth worst earthquake in history, just three months before the Beijing Olympics were scheduled to open. The Communist government’s official response has been controversial to say the least. Despite the quake’s severity, many suspect it would not have been as deadly had government construction been less shoddy, particularly at schools. Promises have been made to Sichuan survivors, usually by politicians orchestrating media ops, but the delivery of relief has been slow and problematic.
Du focuses his lens on the haunted faces of Sichuan’s dispossessed. They live in shanty towns and temporary housing, enduring shortages of food and power. Many would like to return home, but following a truly perverse plan of action, the government has begun demolishing houses that withstood the quake. Such is the efficiency of China’s emergency management. For many survivors, it appears all the authorities have to offer is an opportunity to wave at the Premier’s tour bus as his motorcade blows through town.
Stylistically compatible with China’s so-called D-Generation (D for Digital) filmmaking, Du eschews conventional documentary techniques, like formal interviews and voiceover narration. Instead, he lets the camera roll, capturing the unfiltered reality of the quake’s aftermath at intervals of ten and two hundred ten days after the disaster. It is not pretty.
There is clearly a lot of anger in Sichuan that survivors do not seem to know how to express. One frustrated old man offers perhaps the most direct censure of the government, complaining: “The policies of the Communist Party are good in essence but they have been carried out wrongly.” In fact, the survivors seen in 1428 are much more guarded in their grievances than the grieving parents featured in Unnatural. Of course, it is worth bearing in mind Du’s footage was shot a mere nine years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, so he might well have been more circumspect in what he choose to include, for his subjects’ sake.
Like many of the D-Generation films, 1428 obliquely criticizes the Chinese Communist government from a perspective that would be considered left of center in the west. One elderly Taoist mystic (with much prompting) links the earthquake to the lack of observance of the Earth-God (perhaps implying a corresponding paucity of respect for the Earth by extension). However, the most heartbreaking footage of 1428 involves bereaved parents searching for the remains of their missing children amid the wreckage of their schools.
1428 is an eye-opening dose of reality, straight-up without any external editorializing. It is not the popular image of contemporary China the government has worked to cultivate. In truth, it does require some patience (though not as much as Du’s previous film Umbrella) because it so scrupulously represents life as it is for the Sichuan survivors. Consistently illuminating, it is definitely recommended to anyone in the City of Angels when it screens tonight at 8:00pm at the LA Film Fest (6/21).
Posted on June 21st, 2010 at 10:07am.
This was a very sad trailer, but it opened a window into the world of the average Chinese that is very eye-opening to me. I can’t believe this is how they have been treated by their own government. It’s intereting how the filmmaker just let the cameras roll. The earthquake was tragic and shocking, and yet the Chinese seem to be amazingly resilient in adapting – or perhaps it is just the face they show when the cameras are rolling.
Frankly, I was shocked by the guy in the car who kept exclaiming “our leaders are doing a great job, they have a noble spirit, long live our leaders” etc. It had a really tragic quality to it, because the guy was obviously very emotional and felt he had to say this, and yet it had a quality of desperate denial, like he knew his leaders were absolutely atrocious and had no regard for human life, yet he couldn’t quite believe it in the face of the tragedy that he and the Chinese people were living through, so he had to tell himself that their Communist leaders were doing a great job just so he could emotionally make it through the day.
People don’t realize how brave it is of these Chinese to be speaking openly to these filmmakers. Anything they say can and will be prosecuted by the Chinese government. That is no doubt the reason why some of these citizens feel the need to say such sycophantic things praising their own leaders. They’re frightened of what will happen if they speak the truth.
Some years ago I watched an excellent documentary about the Tiananmen Square massacre (I don’t recall the title) in which a Chinese citizen who was running away from the massacre was briefly interviewed by the film crew. He was running and was in the midst of a large panicked crowd, but he made a few comments critical of the regime. The man said one or two sentences at most. Well, the Chinese Communist government launched a huge, nation-wide campaign to find out who this man was. They posted the footage of him on national TV, had his image everywhere, and finally some people recognized him and turned him in. He was arrested, convicted, and put in prison. That’s the kind of hideous system that the Communist Chinese rule over.
There is no freedom of speech in China, and Western countries are deluded if they think that doing business with the Communists will somehow bring about democratic reforms. They won’t. The Communist are using all the money they are earning from Western businesses to enrich their own coffers (certainly not help their people) and build up their military. What they will do in the future with that built up military is too frightening to contemplate.