Category: Documentaries

Nocturne (녹턴, Jeong Gwan-jo, 2019)

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“Every day is a battlefield” the mother of Eun Seongho, one of the protagonists of Jeong Gwanjo’s documentary Nocturne (녹턴) exclaims while trying to keep her son in line during a difficult journey on the underground. Seongho is autistic and has learning difficulties. He is very dependent on his mother, Minseo, who raised him and his brother Geongi alone after their (never seen) father left the family. But while Minseo does her best to push Seongho towards a stable career as a classical musician, Geongi seems to flounder extremely resentful of his mother and brother in feeling both burdened and excluded. 

Geongi later claims that he does not feel part of the family and as a child assumed that his mother disliked him as all of her time was taken up with trying to care for Seongho. Now as an adult he struggles to settle, once training as a concert pianist himself but later dropping out of university to start a business which he says failed because of a scam. “There are no nice people in this world,” he sighs while openly wondering what sort of man he’d be if only he’d had the same love and attention poured on him as Seongho had heavily implying he’d have made much more of his life.

Seongho’s language skills are limited and he is easily distracted, unable to sit still and often jumping around like a child or else making high pitched noises to release some of his frustration. Of course, all of this is particularly difficult in the rarefied world of classical music which depends on a sense of formality and decorum. Minseo painstakingly rehearses with him, reminding Seong-ho to lift the tails of his suit as he sits at the piano and place his hand on the edge of the keyboard as he bows. His music teacher berates him for not practicing and then lying about it, telling Minseo he’s at the end of his tether as he feels he does not know how to get through Seongho while himself frustrated by his slow progress and knowing that only increases the pressure on Seongho who will then become avoidant and unwilling to play at all. 

Minseo seems to be hoping that Seongho will be able to support himself financially through his music and is acutely aware that caring for him will become more difficult as she ages while she obviously cannot be there for him forever. The manager of residential centre she takes him to grimly adds that many parents of children like Seongho hope that they will be able to bury their children with their own hands while Minseo wonders if she’d be able to go peacefully outliving him  by just a few moments.

All of which is the reason that she places so much pressure on Geongi to take care of his brother so that Seongho will be looked after once she’s gone. But that only deepens Geongi’s resentment feeling as if he only exists as a caretaker for Seongho and his own life is unimportant, wilfully sacrificed by his mother whom he cannot forgive for the sense of rejection he feels. He claims not to resent Seongho himself, but doesn’t see why he should sacrifice his life for him and firmly refuses the responsibility. Meanwhile, be becomes a heavy drinker working several low paying jobs to get by while practicing piano in his spare time. 

Yet after agreeing to accompany him to St. Petersburg where ends up playing the piano for him after a snafu with the sheet music, Geongi comes to a new understanding of his brother explaining that as they played together it finally felt as if they were really conversing and Seongho for the first time felt like a big brother to him. Echoing the universal language of music, the film never shies away from the difficulties faced by those responding to Seongho’s complex needs or his own in his inabilities to make himself understood or when his behaviour confuses others such as his need to touch things on the subway, but does ultimately discover a kind of rebalancing as Geongi finds new ways to connect with his brother along with a new acceptance of himself.

Nocturne screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Original trailer (UK subtitles)

Eat Bitter (Pascale Appora-Gnekindy & Sun Ningyi, 2023)

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“Happiness is not about what you eat or what you wear but mutual understanding” according to Luan, a Chinese construction manager, in Pascale Appora-Gnekindy & Sun Ningyi’s documentary Eat Bitter. Mutual understanding is perhaps something he’s striving for in his working life in the Central African Republic which is as the opening titles state one of the poorest places on Earth. As China deepens its economic investment in Africa, Luan is one of many who’ve travelled overseas in search of higher salaries to provide better lives for their families.

His struggles are mirrored in those of Boa, a local man who works a sand diver gathering the raw materials that Luan needs for his construction work. Boa’s wife has recently left him with their two children whom he can barely support, though as it later turns out that may partly be because he had conceived a child with another woman whom he subsequently tries to marry only to see the relationship fail when she regards him as unkind and can no longer live with him. Luan’s status as a migrant worker has also placed a strain on his family life. Having left when his son was a teenager, he worries that he wasn’t there to effectively parent him at an important age which has contributed to the difficulties his wife is currently facing in her relationship with him. Luan and Yuzhen talk every day on the phone and she generally seems upbeat but later makes an attempt on her life in the depths of her loneliness being separated from her husband and estranged from her son. 

The film’s title comes from a phrase that Luan utters close to its conclusion that one must eat bitter before tasting sweet, meaning that in order to find happiness one must endure hardship. But then the hardships that he and Boa are facing are obviously very different. Luan is here to build to a bank, a slick and modern building that symbolises a new future for an otherwise impoverished country which might be one reason the president wants to come in person to inaugurate it with an election looming along with the rise of a new militia threatening civil war. While working on the project, Luan complains that the local workers are slow in comparison to the speed and efficiency common in China while it’s clear that health and safety concerns are almost non-existent. A large group of men standing on a skinny girder joke that they’ll die if they fall but no one is wearing helmets or other safety gear. At one point it’s suggested that they were provided but the workers opted not to use them. In any case, a local worker is eventually killed due to a fall on site causing Luan to reflect that he should have made helmets mandatory and has perhaps failed in his duty of care to the casual workers he employs. 

Boa says his job is dangerous too and that he’s caused himself injury due to being preoccupied with his complicated domestic situation. His dream is to buy a canoe and go into business for himself, something which his current boss supports and even offers to help him with even if the sand diving business appears to be semi-legal and precarious. The authorities soon close down the site where Boa and the other men were gathering sand and gravel stating that they want to redevelop it but when the boss returns sometime later he discovers that nothing has been done and wonders why they had to be moved on. 

Later Luan and his wife attend the opening of a new apartment building for a banquet hosted by his hitherto unseen boss Madame He but it seems unlikely that many of the local residents would be able to afford to live in a place like this even if like the bank it is intended as symbol of what the Central African Republic could become rather than what it is now. Asked for his opinion on the Chinese, Boa states that he feels they’ve got a raw deal. The Chinese are just like white people, he remarks, they say they’ve come to help but they earn a lot more money and the terms of the deal are disadvantageous to men like him. Perhaps this is an ironic inversion of the mutual understanding Luan was talking about though admittedly more in reference to his now much happier relationship with his wife who has finally agreed to relocate in order to be with him. In any case, it’s true that both men are intent on building a mutually beneficial future even if it’s one where the scales are very much tipped. 

Eat Bitter screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Into the Shaolin (在少林, Sun Hongyun, 2023)

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Like many of the monks at the centre of Sun Hongyun’s documentary Into the Shaolin (在少林
zài Shàolín), our associations with the name are almost exclusively tied up with martial arts movies. Yet as they discovered on entering the temple, it’s not all about kung fu which to some at least came as a disappointment when they were still novices tasked with performing ordinary chores. Then again, many of them do not necessarily anticipate being monks all their lives and so long spent in contemplation leaves them with few other ways to support themselves in the secular world other than through leveraging their martial arts training.

As we can see, many monks come to the temple in childhood often to escape poverty or because they were thought to be troublemakers at home. Sun follows the little monks with empathy, capturing both their mastery over the craft at such a young age and the pain and difficulty it often causes them raising series ethical issues over whether it is right and fair to expect so much from small children who often cry in pain or frustration. Others also remark that they miss their parents having essentially been sent away though one boy explains that his mother managed to get a job nearby so that she can still spend time with him and observe his training.

It’s these familial ties that present the strongest contradictions to the monks and bind them more fully to the secular world. One young man who came to the temple for lack of other options contemplates remaining there for the rest of his life and is a little resentful that even at 18 he still has to get the permission of the grandparents who raised him to go on a mountain retreat. The grandparents, who lost their son, his father, in a workplace accident they believe caused by overwork, want nothing more than for him to get married and start a business and so they flatly refuse to allow him to go on being a monk forever instructing him not to bother contacting them again if that’s what he plans to do. 

But then as others have said, being a shaolin monk doesn’t teach you how to live in the secular world and gives you few transferable skills that would allow you to support yourself. An older monk explains that most of the monks who came to the temple at the same time as him have left but almost all still work with martial arts in some capacity as there’s nothing else for them to do. Even so, the little monks talk of doing other things with their lives once they grow up one hoping to become a soldier defending China and another a movie star. Many came to the temple specifically because of their love of kung fu films starring Jet Li, Donnie Yen, or Wang Baoqiang who himself trained in Shaolin martial arts. 

Others meanwhile have found serenity in the rhythms of the temple and may no longer be suited to living outside of it. The show the boys are preparing utilises a series of boxes of the kind they usually sleep in which as one monk admits to the untrained eye closely resemble coffins but as he puts it no one really needs much more space than their body naturally occupies and it doesn’t really matter where they sleep. Of course, to those in the secular world those things mean a great deal and there’s probably a big difference between a box at the temple and one on the street. Another monk reflects on the shaolin name which means “few trees” though at the temple few is a lot and less is more. He thinks that it’s a fallacy to consider a “return” to the secular world because the true “return” is to your true self which you only discover by leaving home. 

That might be a sentiment shared by a Serbian doctoral student staying at the temple while researching her thesis and in particular the concept of “Chan”. Offering her own insights as a foreigner living at the temple she reflects on the differing attitudes to nature found in China while she seems to be the only woman currently in training. She remarks that it might be odd to call a temple home but that’s what it’s been to here even as she prepares to leave it. Sun’s documentary has an ambivalence to it, at once admiring of the monks in their asceticism, but also somewhat sad not only for their inability to escape their suffering, merely exchange one kind for another, but also for the predicament they my find themselves in should the time come to leave the temple whether by their own will or otherwise.

Into the Shaolin screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC and is available to stream in the US until Nov. 26.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Heaven Rain Flows Sweetly (Li Shasha, 2023)

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In her personal essay film Heaven Rain Flows Sweetly, Li Shasha finds herself meditating on her rootless life and traditional attitudes to the natural world when confronted firstly by ecological disaster and then by global pandemic. In the traditional culture of the Nakhi People among whom Li grew up in the remote landscape of the Himalayas, they say there was once a war between humanity and the spirits because humanity took too much from the Earth and gave nothing in return. As wildfires rip through Oregon where she handled settled and begun a garden, she wonders if we haven’t reneged on our bargain and are paying for our lack of regard for nature.

On a return to the US, it suddenly seems odd to her that grasshoppers and frogs appear only as motifs on shop window displays amid the grey concrete of the cities. As child, she had taken part in rituals honouring fire but now sees its terrifying potential as the world around her is reduced to ashes. In the wake of disaster, she pays a visit home to see the grandmother who raised her while her her own mother studied abroad but encounters a different kind of destruction as the village she once new has become a living museum. Now designated a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site, most of the original residents have moved away and rent their traditional-style homes out to the throngs of tourists which now descend on the region. Wandering around the town she sees a bustling night life scene in which the traditional dance of Nakhi People has been repurposed as entertainment for outsiders drinking in the many bars.

In order to rediscover Nakhi culture she must head further into the mountains, but also observes that this way of life has also been disrupted by encroaching modernity. She finds a little girl who, as she once was, is being cared for by grandparents while her brother and mother work in the city. Her cousin has returned from university for the summer and remarks how much more difficult it is to readjust to rural life than it is become used to urban living. It seems much hotter here than he remembered, he’d never have thought to bring a hat, and given the ongoing drought they now farm corn rather than rice. The young man asks if America is more ecologically friendly than China, which seems like an ironic question but prompts Li into a reconsideration of her own relationship with the natural world along with the uncomfortable reminder that as she walks through America she treads on the land of another displaced indigenous people. 

Li celebrates Lunar New Year with the villagers and only hears of an imminent lockdown and a mysterious new disease that seems again like a kind of rebuke for the way mankind has treated the Earth. Presented with a choice, she can’t decide whether to stay or go and reflects that far from uniting us the pandemic has presented only more division. But then even on her return to the US she finds new ways of being and echoes of a more traditional culture in a local community garden that reminds of the way the villagers live tending to the earth with togetherness and replacing what one takes in a gentle symbiosis with nature. 

Using mainly English when talking about her life in America and Mandarin for that in China, Li laments she knows no Nakhi and has lost touch with her culture which seems to be retreating even further in the face of encroaching modernity. Even so, she begins to reevaluate the balance of her life while asking if it’s already too late or if we, like her ancestors, can find new ways to repair our relationship with nature and learn to live in harmony with it once again. Li’s poetic voiceover lends a touch of melancholy to her exploration of all we’ve all lost in a bid for modernity but also perhaps a note of hope that scorched earth can still be replanted though it may take many hands to do so. 

Heaven Rain Flows Sweetly screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC and is available to stream in the US until Nov. 26.

Total Trust (Zhang Jialing, 2023)

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“The government strives to provide a stable society, fair legal system, and quality services to ensure the fulfilment, happiness, and security of its people,” according to a news reader at the beginning of Zhang Jialing’s documentary exploring the contemporary surveillance state of the modern China, Total Trust. In recent mainstream narrative cinema, there has a been a clear message that the Chinese citizen is safe nowhere other than at home, but here other voices tell us that threat comes not only from abroad but from within and the co-operation of all citizens is necessary to ensure the nation’s security. 

Early scenes see what others may regard as busybodies enforcing public order by picking up rubbish or monitoring minor parking infractions, but it’s precisely this sense of oppressive community pressure that “social management” systems are designed to create. Utilising cutting edge technology, the authorities harvest big data to assess the “trustworthiness” of the ordinary citizen and accord them a rank which then affects all aspects of their lives from their ability to gain or maintain employment to the right to use public transport. Social responsibility is rewarded with points for the above mentioned activities but also for keeping an eye on your neighbours and ensuring they aren’t planning to do anything “subversive” while your neighbours also watch you. 

But this trustworthiness is not so much towards the society as it is towards the Party. Many of Zhang’s protagonists are lawyers and their families who were targeted during a recent crackdown and charged with subverting state power because they defended those who claimed they’d been falsely convicted of crimes which is problematic because the Party cannot be wrong and it doesn’t make mistakes. Chang Weiping was arrested in 2020 and sent back to his hometown for house arrest leaving him separated from his wife and son. He recounts frequent torture which caused him permanent physical damage while his wife has also found herself targeted by the surveillance state after protesting his imprisonment. 

Other families report similar harassment. Wenzu Li’s husband Quanzhang Wang was imprisoned because of his championing of human rights and though he’s since been released the couple have effectively been banned from social media with any photos featuring their faces automatically removed by AI technology and the accounts that posted them limited. They are constantly watched while the police have also motivated their neighbours to monitor and shun them. After being invited to speak at an international conference, their door is blocked by mysterious mask-wearing neighbours who physically prevent them from leaving (they later appear at the conference via Zoom). Their son has also had to change schools almost every term because of the persistent harassment and their own low social credit ranking.

As another persecuted journalist, Sophia, points out after generations of censorship, a degree of censure has become internalised and in general people tend to self-censor without necessarily regarding it as an infringement on their freedom. Many people welcome this kind of oppressive “security” because it makes them feel safe while others are too afraid of the potential consequences to resist. Weiping’s wife takes his father to task for giving up on the campaign against his imprisonment as he remains reluctant to challenge the Party of which he has been a lifelong member, while he agrees that he is simply old and frightened and doesn’t want to be subjected to state harassment himself. 

Weiping’s wife eventually decides to emigrate to the US believing there is no future for her son in China while Weiping himself remains imprisoned. The journalist makes plans to study abroad in the UK, which might in itself be ironic given the increasing authoritarianism of the British government. The UK is already one of the most surveilled places in the world and similar kinds of AI-based facial recognition technology are already being employed in law enforcement. In any case, she is arrested at the airport and prevented from the leaving the country before being detained and charged with the same “subverting government power” line as the lawyers. According to the closing titles, she remains in prison. Emergency powers introduced during the pandemic have only enabled a wider authoritarian power grab with authorities now able to manipulate “health ratings” to silent protest or otherwise make lives unliveable by simply switching the reading to red meaning that the target can be arrested simply for leaving their home. Citizens may need to reevaluate the “trustworthiness” of the government but are of course prevented from doing so in a society in which their every movement is already closely controlled.

Total Trust screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Ashima (Kenji Tsukamoto, 2023)

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A teenage rock climber wrestles with the pressures of parental expectation and early fame in Kenji Tsukamoto’s probing documentary, Ashima. A champion of bouldering, the titular Ashima is climbing prodigy who has her eyes set on being the youngest person to complete a V14 climb, a feat only one woman has ever completed before and even veterans take years to conquer. But then she herself and the documentary seem to ask at what cost her victories may be coming when she’s so busy looking up she doesn’t have much time for what’s around her.

As Ashima sadly points out, at times it feels as if her father, Poppo, a retired butoh dancer now living in New York, is her only friend. Her love of climbing leaves her little time to interact with children her own age and she can’t really make friends with other climbers either given the competitiveness of the environment. It’s also an unavoidable fact that at her level most of the competitors are adult men with whom she obviously can’t have a lot of meaningful conversation. At one point, we see her paint her nails like any other teenage girl though they’ll be chipped soon enough when she needs them again for climbing and she seemingly has little social outlet outside of sports. Her parents reassure her that friends can be fickle and family is forever but however well-meaning there’s no denying that the phrase has uncomfortably possessive overtones.

That maybe something further echoed in her relationship with Poppo who acts as her climbing coach and mentor admitting that his teaching methods are rooted in his experiences as a butoh dancer and necessarily strict. Even Ashima later reflects that having her father as a coach can be frustrating as she feels as if he doesn’t listen to her or make an effort to see things from her point of view. He often gives her harsh advice about mental toughness and fortitude insisting that if she feels cold it’s only proof that she isn’t sufficiently focussed while allowing a sense of failure to mess with her head after repeatedly falling while trying to plan a difficult climb. Ashima reflects that sometimes it’s like he’s her best friend, but also a worst enemy who knows how to push her buttons and has no qualms about doing so. 

Ashima seems to feel her responsibility to her parents keenly, not least as Poppo has encouraged to her meditate on the disappointment her mother and sponsors would feel if she did not complete her climb. Her mother meanwhile recalls that she wanted her to be a person who inspires the world which is quite a heavy burden for young girl to bear adding to the sense of pressure and isolation Ashima seems to feel even while adding that climbing is also her dream too. Ashima is an only child of older parents who underwent infertility treatment for several years before she was born and is obviously a deeply treasured daughter though one who also knows that and feels acutely guilty while reaching the age which she might wish to have more independence. 

In any case, a journey to South Africa with her father develops into a spiritual confrontation both with herself and with him as she contemplates the V-14 climb and is forced to face her self-consciousness and insecurity in order to literally climb the mountain. Tsukamoto intercuts footage of her seemingly easy victories at indoor competitions with her lowest moments as her wounded confidence begins to eat away at her quite literally preventing her from getting a purchase on the rock. In an ironic touch, the chalk covering her hands echoes the white makeup worn by butoh dancers, the strange chanting and yelling rituals apparently aiding a breakthrough that allows Ashima to rediscover her self-confidence and complete the climb. Speaking at a Ted Talk, she reflects that climbing is mostly finding an accommodation with failure and falling is a normal part of the climb not something to be feared or ashamed of. As Poppo later concedes, it’s Ashima’s life to explore even if she rolls her eyes slightly to hear her parents cheerfully discussing the possibility of attempting a V15 having discovered at least a path that’s her own as much as it is anyone else’s.

Ashima screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC.

How to Have an American Baby (Leslie Tai, 2023)

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“Mama, why wasn’t I born in America?” a salesman promoting a programme bringing women from China to give birth in the US so that their child will have citizenship rather manipulatively states in an almost certainly made-up quote from a child jealous of another’s life of baseball playing freedom abroad. The never quite explained mystery at the centre of Leslie Tai’s documentary How to Have an American Baby is why exactly so many families find US citizenship so desirable given that they have no immediate intention of living there themselves.

A father later suggests that he was looking for “security”, perhaps implying a sense of anxiety regarding the future direction of China while others insist they want their kids educated in the US presumably to take advantage of more global opportunities (additional press materials also suggest a desire for a legal security not afforded to children born out of wedlock). But it’s also true that the US has shockingly high maternal mortality rates in comparison to the rest of the developed world and that, though it seems they may not have realised it, these women are risking their lives and the lives of their unborn children undergoing an incredibly stressful and difficult period of confinement and later medical procedure usually alone and unable to speak the language. Most of the women appear to be under the care of Mandarin-speaking doctors, yet their manner is often rough and unkind while at least one woman seems to suspect that the advice she’s being given may not be impartial. As non-residents who do not have medical insurance, the parents assume that the hospitals are taking advantage of the Chinese patients and charging whatever they like with rates far higher than locals would typically pay.

One could therefore say that this is a very circular business. The hospitals make their money and they’re happy, while a small industry seems to have arisen with Chinese migrants running maternity hospitals to facilititate this practice. However, largely unable to speak English themselves, they can offer little help in a crisis and as they are operating in a legal grey area are not keen to get involved in any disputes. One woman, Lele, who unfortunately loses her baby she suspects as a result of medical malpractice is kept isolated from the other mothers and given almost no support. In the lengthy birth scene in which one mother undergoes a difficult labour lasting more than a day, the director is called away to translate for Lele with alarming warnings about a baby “coding” and that there is something wrong with their heartbeat all of which only places further stress on the mother giving birth who worries that her own anxiety is the reason the delivery is taking so long.  

Meanwhile, alarm is being raised by residents of the local area in which many of these “maternity hotels” are situated. They complain about increased traffic and noise due to the fact that ordinary family homes are now being used for a commercial purpose though one woman’s suggestion that they report such an innocuous sound as a baby crying (incorrectly assuming the women are also giving birth at the hotel) could obviously have unintended consequences and speaks to a greater degree of ingrained prejudice. A local government representative suggests that beyond instituting checks to ensure building safety there isn’t much they can do as the hotels aren’t breaking any laws or occupancy rules and even if they were they’d just pay someone to lease another property under a different name and set up somewhere else. 

As the salesman had suggested, for some of the women US citizenship is a status symbol and something they’re made to feel they’re denying their children if they chose to give birth to them at home. This process is expensive, and many of the families lead lives far more materially comfortable in China than they likely would in the US yet they see US citizenship as something that will be extremely beneficial to their children and so naturally want to give them the best if also securing their own status in being able to give it to them. Perhaps as one man at the neighbourhood meeting suggests, it’s only “smart” to take advantage of this obvious business opportunity but it’s also true that it’s the families who are perhaps being exploited in being missold a safe and easy path to engineering future possibility for their as yet unborn children. 

How to Have an American Baby screens Nov. 14 as part of DOC NYC and will be available to stream in the US until Nov. 26 before making its broadcast premiere on Dec. 11th on POV.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Elegies (詩, Ann Hui, 2023)

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Many of the poets featured in Ann Hui’s documentary Elegies (詩) are keen to emphasise that poetry is rarely about what it says it’s about and often as much about what doesn’t say. The documentary is much the same, making a point about the power of poetry in an age resistance, an elegy for the disappearing Hong Kong the poets lament two of them no longer living in the city but somehow still defined by it. 

The tables reversed by one of her subjects, Hui explains that the documentary is a labour of love. She admits that it’s not a mainstream movie and that no one would fund it, but she decided to do it anyway despite or perhaps because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic which is itself makes frequent appearances in the film. In any case, Hui splits her time mainly between veteran poet Huang Canran who now lives in Mainland China and his younger disciple Liu Wai Tong who lives in Taiwan. 

As Canran says, the poems prove his love for Hong Kong but he also feels as if it was Hong Kong that forced him to leave. Joking that he’s an economic exile, he explains that he mainly moved after being forced out by the rapid cost of living in the city. He cheerfully explains that being a poet means embracing destitution and is embarrassed about the other kinds of writing such as penning a newspaper column that he did solely for the money. Canran’s main source of income comes from translation though his personal motto is to work hard to not earn money while practicing his art. His daughter doesn’t really get it and is confused about why Ann Hui wants to make a documentary about her father, though as Canran admits prophets are rarely appreciated in their hometowns. The Hong Kong he writes about is another place, perhaps somewhere that never really existed or any rate exists no longer. 

A photographer and lecturer in poetry, Liu Wai Tong heads in a more philosophical direction while also living as an exile in Taipei, never quite explaining the reasons he left Hong Kong though perhaps because it would awkward to do so directly. He quotes Brecht and asks what the point of poetry is in an age of protest, how their voices can resonate among a thousand other horrors crying out for speech. Yet as other poets had said, poems about nature are not always about nature just as political poems are not always about politics. By saying one thing and not another they can make a message felt but then there’s nothing really wrong with talking about beauty amid myriad horrors. 

Another poet writes about the everyday, causing others to ask if you can really call it a poem if it’s just about the unexpected appearance of a cockroach. The words should be simple, they insist, their meaning at least clear even if the message is ambiguous. Obscurity for obscurity’s sake is always doomed to failure. Many of the poets write from their direct experience detailing their ordinary lives in the city while others rejoice in wordplay or metaphor, but Hong Kong colours all of their work. Echoing the other poets, Hui too admits that it’s poetry that sustained her in her darkest hours. The poems that she learned as a child gave her strength when she needed it. A woman who has been writing to a friend in prison is moved to tears on recalling his reaction to a poem she had sent him, feeling that poem if can touch someone years after it was written than it must have intrinsic meaning.

Thus poetry in itself becomes an act of resistance if solely in defiance and the determination to endure even the most difficult circumstances from the anxiety of a global pandemic to the spectre of political unrest and lingering oppression. At once an elegy for the Hong Kong the poets speak of and its many rueful exiles, the film makes a passionate defence of poetry as a lifeline thrown by one lonely soul to another across often turbulent seas and carrying with it a message most powerful in its silence. 

Elegies screened as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Contestant (Clair Titley, 2023)

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“All humans are entertaining,” or perhaps “interesting” at least to the producer of a variety TV programme who later admits that he may have a kind of detachment that allows him to bypass normal ethical concerns or responsibilities towards others. His words may at first seem egalitarian or humanistic, but they also point to a commodification of the human spirit in which the everyman is merely a figure liable for exploitation by a puppet master like the later remorseful Tsuchiya. 

Clair Titley’s documentary character study The Contestant explores the birth of reality television in a Japan still mired in malaise following the collapse of the bubble economy asking both why someone would put themself through so much degradation and indeed why others would find their humiliation entertaining. From an audience perspective, there may be an assumption that Nasubi, the titular contestant, conceived this idea himself and is entirely consenting to the way he’s being treated but as he explains Nasubi had simply attended an audition to appear on popular variety programme Denpa Shonen and had no idea what was going on. Selected by lottery, he was led away by Tsuchiya and installed in a studio apartment where he was told to strip and that he was now taking part in a skit to see if someone could live solely on prizes won from magazine giveaways. He knew that he was being filmed, but was given the impression the footage would not air on television and was presumably intended for another purpose once the project was over. His ordeal would last more than a year.

As is repeatedly stated, Nasubi was never a prisoner. The door was always open and he could have chosen to leave at any time but did not do so. Asked why this is, why despite malnutrition and the possibility of starvation, the humiliation of being forced to eat dog food, the loneliness and isolation, an older Nasubi reflects that when you become so mentally and physically broken leaving no longer occurs to you. He considered suicide many times, but never simply walking out the door. 

The irony is that audience satisfaction is largely derived from Nasubi’s “happiness” in his overjoyed reactions to finally winning something. Edited down to a weekly digest, the programme includes only such happy moments rather than the crushing sense of futility and loneliness Nasubi recounts in his diaries which also become, unbeknownst to him, best sellers. A British BBC correspondent explains that the show was popular with younger people and less so with the older generation who remembered post-war privation and simply did not find the idea of a man facing starvation alone, naked, in a tiny apartment very funny nor did those who were suffering economically themselves.

Equally, some perhaps feel that as it’s only a TV show it isn’t really “real” and so it can’t really be affecting Nasubi in a negative or long-lasting way even if what’s really happening is more like torture at the hands of an out of control media puppet master who admits he didn’t really know what he was doing and was simply trying to push things as far as they would go without actually killing their subject. The film presents Tsuchiya and Nasubi as two sides of the same coin, both sons of policemen who were forced to move around a lot as children because of a common practice in Japan to rotate law enforcement officials and other civil servants to different areas every few years as a means of preventing corruption. Nasubi reveals that he got his nickname, “aubergine”, from the kids who bullied him at every new school objecting to his long face. Gradually, he developed the defence mechanism of making people laugh so they wouldn’t bully him. This might explain why he responds to what extends to sustained harassment from Tsuchiya by increased mugging for the camera, while Tsuchiya by contrast agrees that his childhood experiences have left him “detached” and unable to make deeper connections with other people. 

In some senses, it’s possible to think of reality television as frustrated bid for connection and that like his childhood self Nasubi is trying to gain control by owning the joke only to later feel damaged and traumatised by his experiences, insisting that the way Tsuchiya in particular treated him caused him to lose faith in humanity and left an unfillable void in his heart. The surprising thing is that unlike Tsuchiya, who later seems to accept that his actions were unethical and exploitative, Nasubi does not become cruel or embittered but finally finds a way to heal himself in helping others especially the people of his hometown, Fukushima, after the devastating earthquake in 2011. Though he admits it would be impossible not to harbour resentment towards Tsuchiya for everything he put him through, he also believes that the experience gave him something very special in showing him that no one can survive alone and granting him a better understanding of the importance of humanity and the spirit of supporting each other. 

Titley captures the sense of anarchism in late ‘90s variety with brief clips of the extreme onscreen graphics which have informed modern meme culture, even suggesting ironic use of an aubergine to cover Nasubi’s modesty may have given rise to the current use of the emoji. To dampen the sense of overstimulation which can often occur with these kinds of programmes, she dubs some of the original voiceover and replaces text with English in the same kinds of crazy fonts often employed in variety shows but is always very careful not to exoticise the content or imply these are things that only happen in “wacky Japan” but instead sensitively explores how Nasubi was able to find something positive in the midst of an incredibly traumatising situation and use that to lead a more fulfilling life despite those who may still try to mock or belittle him.

The Contestant screened as part of this year’s DOC NYC.

Youth (Spring) (青春, Wang Bing, 2023)

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There’s an almost eerie quality to the absence of age in Wang Bing’s sprawling exploration of the Zhili textile industry Youth (Spring). Perhaps for reasons of tact, the ages of older workers, unlike those under 35, are not displayed while they are also predominantly female. One has to wonder where the young men who currently work on the shop floor will later end up if they generally do not stay in this line of work though alternatively it may be further evidence of generational shift in which the young men of 30 or 40 years ago simply did not take up jobs as seamstresses. In any case, the only older men we see here are factory owners and floor managers while the older women are often at the forefront of mostly futile attempts at collective bargaining. 

Many young migrant workers apparently prefer the factories in Zhili because they offer a greater degree of freedom than the large state-run complexes which often micromanage the lives of their employees in almost prison-like conditions. But then it’s also obvious that they struggle and largely cannot earn a living wage despite the long hours they are often forced to put in. One younger worker tries to complain about the lack of overtime pay on offer, explaining that he needs to make at least 4-500 yuan a day and cannot do that without the extra payment but the manager simply tells him that he pays better than other shops and in any case there are plenty of rural youngsters who will be happy to take his job. 

The later part of the film is largely concerned with attempts at collective bargaining led by veteran workers who find themselves frustrated by the system. This kind of work is often seasonal and ironically unavailable in the spring during which many workers return home to their villagers. They are paid on piece rate contracts but the rate is set by the kinds of garments they’re making and they often can’t know how much money they’ll be getting by the end of the season. Consequently they try to work up the rate on certain items while at times resentful of other workers who’ve been able to make more solely because they were assigned different tasks which pay better. The managers give them all the usual excuses, largely refusing to budge or offering only a modest per item increase which as one worker points out will barely make a difference if the quota is small anyway. 

Wang gives more of an overview rather than focussing on a series of individuals but discovers an ironic intersection of the legacy of the One Child Policy and the economic realities of today. At the first workshop, a couple who met on the shop floor experience an unexpected pregnancy. The young woman, Shengnan, seems to be given little choice in the matter which is largely being decided by the respective parents on each side. Because of the additional complications of the residence system (they are each from different districts) the parents both want the couple to move closer to them especially as the boy’s parents are economically dependent on him as they age. Shengnan’s mother puts her foot down and negotiates with the manager to get Shengnan time off for an abortion but he refuses until Shengnan has finished her current quota after which he says he’ll be very happy for her to take some rest at home to get over it though as another suggests, trying to offer comfort, an abortion is just like getting bitten by a dog and then biting back. He does however accept that it’s the girls who suffer while all the men are “little emperors”.

Evidence of sexism is rife. Another worker needles his girlfriend about her job in an overnight internet cafe, telling her that it’s not good for girls and that it might cause acne while seemingly not bothering to think about how his long shifts at the factory might be affecting him. “Women are useless” another man later exclaims despite being largely supported by them in the workplace, not least by his own mother who works in the same factory. The younger workers are often cheerful, messing around with silly banter and constant flirting. It’s not surprising that relationships often arise with people trapped together such long periods of time with little possibility of going out to meet someone else, but they’re also largely impossible given the futility of trying earn enough to support a family through seamstressing. Another man faces a similar dilemma when he discovers his girlfriend has also become pregnant but cannot decide if he wants to get married, worrying about shouldering the responsibility of a wife and child while financially insecure. 

All of which would seem to conflict with a wider anxiety about children not getting married as parents often reject a potential suitor based on low economic status or residency while young men find themselves frustrated unable to envisage a time when they might be financially stable enough to start a family. Meanwhile, the old-style factory dorms are strewn with rubbish and in general depressing in their grey concrete exteriors and poorly lit rooms. An outburst leading to a physical confrontation between workers seems only natural given the fraught conditions though Wang presents it as a howl of despair from a generation trapped between the old China and the new with very little to show for it.

Youth (Spring) screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival.