Category: Documentaries

Between Goodbyes (Jota Mun, 2024)

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There’s a small irony at the centre of Jota Mun’s documentary Between Goodbyes in that she often cuts back to  contemporary stock footage of television items covering the subject of adoptions in Korea. Pundits are full of panic about the rapidly expanding baby boom of the post-war era and concerned about a growing lack of resources to care for them. Fast-forward 50 years and the problem has reversed as the news items are full of panic about the ageing population and record low birth rate. Still, it’s clear that the nation has not yet fully reckoned with its history of international adoptions which employed dubious practices to separate parents from children and essentially sold babies abroad in a business model more akin to human trafficking. 

Mieke’s mother Okgyun is wracked with guilt about the decision she made to give her up, which was motivated mostly by her poverty, but also a series of social stigmas including that towards large families. With three children already, they simply couldn’t afford another and Okgyun had planned on an abortion though was talked out of it and advised to put the baby up for adoption on the promise that it would have a much better quality of life in America. Of course, the reality was not always so rosy and Okgyun and her husband have spent every moment of their lives since thinking about their missing daughter. Twenty years later, Mieke’s father became determined to find her and eventually discovered she had been sent to the Netherlands. 

For Mieke, the knowledge that her parents had wanted to find her was a source of comfort but also awkward and as she puts it “overwhelming”. Though to them she was their long-lost daughter, to her they were strangers and as she had been raised abroad, she could not even speak their language. Mieke had also experienced a series of other losses including that of her adoptive parents. An uncle and aunt had taken her in, but it didn’t work out leading to a further sense of rejection and abandonment. She describes finding a surrogate family in community but also hints at a constant sense of displacement, never quite feeling at home anywhere.

For these reasons, she found it difficult to relate to her birth parents when they first approached her and struggled to accept the intensity of their emotion. Later, her partner along with the film’s director, ask Mieke if she isn’t afraid of losing them too, as if she’s trying to stave off another abandonment by keeping them at arms’ length while also struggling to balance her own sense of identity caught between an interest in her Korean heritage and sense of belonging, and her Dutch upbringing and life in the Netherlands. There’s an also an additional sense of poignancy in that had Mieke been raised by her birth parents in Korea, she may not have been as free to live as her authentic self in a much more conservative social culture. A secondary reason that she’d avoided keeping in touch with her parents when they first contacted her was that she knew she would have to come out to them and was unsure as to how they’d react. 

Her birth family have, however, fully accepted her wife Marit, and though some of them may say they don’t quite understand, are fully supportive and just happy that she’s happy. On the other hand, it’s true enough that every reunion entails another goodbye with a concurrent sense of abandonment on each side. Another woman from a society supporting parents who gave their children up for adoption remarks that it’s only really with the reunion that the grieving process begins with the intense sense of loss for all missing years, the time and memories that have been stolen for each of them. Incomplete family portraits coloured by a sense of absence symbolise the longing for something that cannot be restored, while Mieke and her mother seem to be divided by an invisible wall. Still in overcoming the language barrier and learning to communicate in a much more direct way, the relationship begins to reforge itself. Perhaps as Okgyun says, there’s no such thing as complete happiness, but there is perhaps warmth and forgiveness and new beginnings that might not quite make up for lost time but do perhaps have the potential to become something else.

Between Goodbyes screens May 1 as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival Spring Showcase.

Trailer

Dryads in a Snow Valley (風の波紋, Shigeru Kobayashi, 2015)

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“You can’t live here alone” a older woman admits having long left the village and returning only to visit her parents’ graves to be shocked by its ongoing decline. Shigeru Kobayashi’s mostly observational documentary loosely follows the life of a middle-aged man who left Tokyo for a life in the mountains only to be frustrated by the March 2011 earthquake. Undeterred, he ignores the advice of a local builder that his 117-year-old home is damaged beyond repair and forges on together with the support of the surrounding villagers to rebuild and restore.

It could in a way be a metaphor for the nation’s determination to do the same in the way of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, but it’s also for Kogure a personal mission to fulfil his dreams of country living. Indeed, he gleefully tends to his rice paddies which he says he’s kept chemical free rather than allow them to be polluted by the modern society. Then again, perhaps this is easy for Kogure to say given that he describes his farming to a fellow farmer as a “hobby” and it’s otherwise clear that he’s not using it as a means to support himself. For these reasons he takes pleasure in the simple though arduous acts of planting and harvesting, pushing a wooden plow through the field and revealing that he discovered the traces of those before him in the remnants of an old irrigation tunnel now buried by mud. For him, this sense of continuity seems to be central as if he’s preserving something of an older Japan and a simpler, more fulfilling way of life. 

Kogure had said he wanted to save the house because it was like the pillars cried out to him. A local dye artist says something similar in that he almost feels the wood he harvests is alive though if it were he wouldn’t be able to cut it. There is a sense of the forest as an almost sentient entity with which the villagers live in harmony, but also a less wholesome vision of nature red in tooth and claw as Kogure offers up one of his goats to have its buds removed with hot iron by a local goat expert. The poor thing cries in pain but is ignored, the expert simply stating that it’s only natural and what is always done though it seems if it really is necessary there must be a less cruel way to do it. Kobayashi later wisely cuts away as we realise a goat is about to be slaughtered, cutting straight to the “meat carnival” it provides for the villagers. 

Most of those interviewed are themselves transplants like Kogure who moved to the mountains 20 or 25 years previously usually from the cities and have largely adapted to a simpler way of life, though it’s also true that there are few young people besides a young woman and her daughter who cheerfully exclaims that rice is her favourite food. The woman is grateful for the unconditional support and acceptance she’s received from the villagers whom she says smile in the face of hardship, keen to help each other and make sure that no one is excluded. Yet this way of life is often hard and it’s true enough that no one can survive here alone amid the heavy winter snows. One old man decides that it isn’t worth trying to repair his home after the earthquake and it’s better to demolish it instead while his wife reflects on her life explaining that she was more or less forced to marry him by her family who lured her back from Tokyo on a ruse that her mother was seriously ill. 

Nevertheless, Kobayashi demonstrates the closeness of the remaining villagers as they bond together through shared feasts, laserdisc karaoke, and a general sense of community. “Breaks are a big part of shovelling snow” one man jokes, focussing not so much on the unending labour as the pleasure taken in rest and friendship. Another later suggests the snow will become “a memory of a trial I survived” echoing the harshness of this village life in winter, even as the camera cuts to a glorious spring filled with bright sunshine and verdant green. Kogure continues to plant his rice while a goat runs about in the field behind him in a timeless vision of pastoral life despite itself persisting. 

Trailer (no subtitles)

The Periphery of the Base (基地之侧, Zhou Tao, 2024)

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Periphery is a strange word. It automatically suggests a border and that the speaker is on one side of it, yet unlike a horizon it implies an end point beyond which there is something or perhaps nothing. The periphery is where one kind of authority begins to fade out, a place where you can no longer quite say you are proximate to another place but now definitively at a distance from it and within a liminal space between one place and another. In the vast emptiness of the Gobi Desert, where and how could anyone really draw this line?

Distance and abstraction are at the centre of Zhou Tao’s experimental documentary Periphery of the Base (基地之侧, jīdì zhī zhāi) as his camera roams around the edges of a construction site somewhere in the desert. We don’t know what they’re building or why they’re building it, only that industry continues mindlessly as if it were almost automatic. The people, fractionally seen, are like worker ants busily beavering away on an unknown purpose. We observe two workmen on a break chatting idly about a dissatisfying work environment, swapping stories about the hatching of a baby goose and the supernatural powers of snakes which one of the men blames for the death of his mother after he killed one and abandoned it at a crossroads. They become excited about such an ordinary thing as cucumber to enliven their working day while sitting alone in a concrete trench as trucks rocket by in front of them and disrupt our ability to overhear their conversation.

Zhou captures other people talking about various ordinary things like the price of sheep, but otherwise follows figures in the landscape often obscured from view like shadows on the horizon. Some of them wear military uniforms, though the vastness of this environment and the dehumanising nature of the construction project seem to rob them all of identity. As the film continues, the sandstorms intensify and it becomes increasingly difficult to see through the mists and darkness. The figures lose their form. We only discern their general outlines as if this landscape had swallowed them or we were standing on the periphery of some other world gazing across a hazy horizon almost impenetrable to us.. We catch their voices on the breeze, but cannot quite discern their language while the camera remains at a distance in the permanent periphery of photography.

But the camera is also part of this world too. The images become hazier, as if the camera itself had sand in its eye, its gait less steady as if it stumbled against the wind. Having begun in documentary realism,  Zhou soon descends into abstraction. The darkness is broken by the flashing red beacons of the construction machine and we are blinded by its light to enter almost another world of dust and shadows that takes on a dreamlike and hypnotic sensibility until we once again discover a figure to lead us out of the darkness and step back from the periphery. What we see now is only blue skies and white birds, a vision of peace and serenity in which the eerie sounds of construction are absent. The camera turns and looks in another direction. We exist on the periphery of destruction, a vast human machine busily undermining its foundations for no clear purpose while wandering through the desert alone beaten by wind and sand in search of the blue sky on which we in our foolishness willingly turned our backs.

The Periphery of the Base screens at Museum of the Moving Image 15th March as part of this year’s First Look

Trailer

A Little Girl’s Dream (夢は牛のお医者さん, Yoshiaki Tokita, 2014)

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The Japanese title of Yoshiaki Tokita’s observational documentary A Little Girl’s Dream (夢は牛のお医者さん, Yume wa Ushi no Oisha-san) is “I Want to be a Cow Doctor”. Following his heroine over a period of 25 years, Tokita attempts to tackle such varied themes as rural depopulation, the difficulties faced by those working in the agricultural industry in the late 20th century, and the changing ways of life in the countryside while essentially telling an inspirational story about a little girl who managed to achieve her childhood dream through hard work and perseverance and is now living a happy and successful life. 

As might be imagined, these competing themes produce a tension in Tokita’s filmmaking, not least among them the paradox in that by becoming a “cow doctor” Tomomi will necessarily become complicit with an industrial system in which it can never be forgotten that these are “economic animals”. Tokita opens the film with scenes from 1987 when he first began the documentary while filming a piece for NHK about a rural school which took on three calves as “new students” because there were no pupils admitted that year and therefore no graduation ceremony. These are all rural children and perhaps they are under fewer illusions about where their meat comes from, but it can’t be denied that raising an animal that will later be sold is emotionally difficult even for adults let alone nine-year-old children. 

Consequently many of them cry during the “graduation ceremony” they hold shortly before the cows are to go to auction (we later find out they were all bought by the same local dairy farmer who agreed to the children’s request they be kept together like siblings). Having become quite attached to them, Tomomi determined to become a vet after noticing many of the cows suffered from health problems. She adopts a “pet” cow at home, along with various other animals including a rabbit, though her family also raises cattle and it isn’t clear what actually happened to the calf in the long term. 

The documentary only briefly touches on the difficulties of rural living on remarking that the family, who were primarily rice farmers, began raising cows as a means of supporting themselves through the winter so that Tomomi’s father would not have to leave the village to look for other work as many of the other farmers are forced to do leaving their wives and children behind. It also only briefly touches on the problems of rural depopulation in referencing the small number of pupils in the school which eventually closed a short time after Tomomi graduated while she had to leave home at 15 and live in a dorm to attend high school because there was no local access to continuing education. By the time the documentary concludes, there are only 20 houses still occupied in her home village, her parents’ among them. 

Meanwhile, Tomomi’s father remarks on the change in his business circumstances following international trade deals which have made it more difficult for local farmers to compete. Despite the compassion that gave birth to Tomomi’s dream, it is impossible to escape the reality that these are “economic animals” and that there is a monetary value placed on their lives. She has to make life or death decisions based on cost effectiveness rather than what is kindest and inform the farmer when the treatment costs would exceed the amount they could expect to earn from the animal in the future whether in terms of meat, births, or milk. Tomomi’s father had originally objected to her desire to become a vet in part because of the physical demands of dealing with large animals but also the emotional in an uncertainty that a woman will be able to set compassion aside in the course of her work. 

There is then a minor irony, in that Tomomi achieves her dream of becoming a cow doctor but does so by switching focus in deriving the pride she feels in her work from her ability to assist farmers and their continuing faith in her. The passage of time is evident in Tokita’s changing media from the home video-style VHS of 1987 to a more commercial widescreen in the closing stretches, yet his scattershot capture of the key moments in Tomomi’s path towards fulfilling her childhood dream occasionally robs them of their power while he remains otherwise torn between his inspirational tale and the grimness that sometimes lies behind it.

Black Box Diaries (Shiori Ito, 2024)

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Shiori Ito, then using just her first name, made headline news when she decided to go public naming a prominent political journalist with strong ties to then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as the man who had drugged and raped her following what she believed was an appointment to discuss a potential job working overseas. Using recordings made at the time along with footage filmed more recently, Black Box Diaries is a kind of companion piece to her book Black Box which details her quest for justice in the face of a misogynistic justice system and conservative society.

The reason she’d only used her first name at her original press conference was to protect her family because there is significant social stigma attached not only to being a survivor of sexual assault but for daring to speak out and disrupt the illusion of social harmony. In fact, during the opening sequence which takes place in a long dark tunnel we hear a recorded phone call with Shiori’s sister who pleads with her not to show her face. The families of those who appear in the news often become targets for the media and can end up being ostracised by their communities or losing their jobs and livelihoods. Shiori herself also tearfully remarks on the guilt and uncertainty she feels because she knows that her decision, which she feels necessary, will have a negative impact on her friends and family while she herself continues to receive hate mail from those who call her an opportunist or ask why talks down her country while continuing to live there.

There is an essential irony in the fact that it’s Shiori who ends up in a symbolic prison, having to leave her apartment and stay with a friend unable to venture outside or work for fear of being hounded by the press. Her decision to go public was motivated by the failure to gain justice via the judicial system firstly because the police do not take her attempt to report her assault seriously. At that time (though they’ve since been updated), Japan’s rape laws hadn’t changed since the Meiji era and were rooted not in ideas of consent but only in whether or not physical violence had taken place and the victim had resisted physically. The secondary charge of “quasi-rape” was used in cases such as these when the victim was unable to do so because they had been drugged or incapacitated in some other way. Thus even though Shiori has evidence such as CCTV footage that shows her being physically carried out of the taxi into the hotel and barely able to walk, it does not help her case and nor does DNA on her bra because it only proves that her assailant touched it and nothing else. An investigator describes what happened to her as taking place within a “black box” that no one can ever really see inside.

But for all that, the film touches on the way that other people latch on to her case and try to use it for their own ends such as an offer from Yuriko Koike, the ultraconservative mayor of Tokyo, to join her new political party which she had started to challenge the ruling LDP of which she was once a member in fact serving as a cabinet minister under Shinzo Abe during his first stint as Prime Minister in 2007. The editor of her book also tells her that the reason everything’s moving so quickly is because of the upcoming election and people should have this kind of information before they vote. The Abe administration was plagued by scandal and accusations of cronyism which the suggestions that he personally intervened because Yamaguchi was a friend of his (and coincidentally also had a book coming out which was a biography of Abe) only furthered this narrative. Shiori counters that she wasn’t really interested in politics (of this kind, at least) and was just trying to tell her story in the interests of justice, but is noticeably dejected on watching Abe once again win in a landslide.

His victory seems to stand in for a triumph of patriarchy as Shiori is repeatedly silenced or ignored. The editor also tells her Yamaguchi could stop her book being published because publishing isn’t given the same freedom as the press theoretically has but does not use. Meanwhile, the implication is that the head of the Tokyo Police stopped Yamaguchi’s arrest in order to bolster his own political capital and was in fact rewarded for it later. Shiori seems to develop a friendly relationship with a conflicted policeman who was sympathetic to her case, but even he drunkenly makes a pass at her during an ill-advised phone call that comes off as sexual harassment and is even more inappropriate given the circumstances. The doorman at the hotel meanwhile makes an awkward attempt to centre himself as the hero when agreeing to testify publicly even if it puts his job at risk that she should be grateful it was him who was on duty because he’d always thought the laws surrounding sexual assault were too lenient though he actually did very little to try to help on the night in question even if he did attempt to call the police but was shut down by the hotel.

Nevertheless, his agreement and support bring Shiori to tears while begins to feel isolated and under incredible pressure from those who regard her as someone who can bring real change. Despite an early monologue warning that if she died and they said she took her own life she’d been bumped off, we later see her heading into a very dark place describing the difficulty of living life in her new persona as “that girl who was raped” even if she also receives support from other women oppressed by Japan’s fiercely patriarchal culture. Of course, others call her a traitor to her gender and say they feel sorry for the men she’s accusing. But still she continues undaunted, eventually emerging from the long dark tunnel at the film’s conclusion and continuing to project the sense of support for other women echoed in the opening title cards addressed to those watching who have likely themselves experienced similar trauma.

Black Box Diaries screened as part of this year’s BFI London Film Festival and will be released in UK cinemas 25th October courtesy of Dogwoof.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Gifts from the Kitchen (キッチンから花束を, Hisashi Kikuchi, 2024)

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One of the few places offering Chinese-style home cooking, Fumin had become a home from for many during the 50 years its founder worked her kitchen herself. Fumi Sai has now retired, though welcoming one set of guests a day to her home, but there are many who continue to visit the restaurant under the management of her nephew Kazuyoshi and reminisce over their long years of enjoying not just the cooking but a familial relationship with Fumi herself. 

Collaboration with the clientele is cited by many as a reason Fumi’s restaurant became so popular. After a few years of working as a hairdresser, she decided to open a cafe after a friend remarked it was a shame more people didn’t have the opportunity to taste her cooking. Her first location was a tiny bar-style place with a handful of seats at the counter which of course meant that she was able to build up close relationships through talking directly to her customers. Others describe her cooking style as spontaneous, that she would come up with new dishes just by adding something or other to see how it would taste but she also took hints from customers as well sometimes adding their successful requests to the main menu and allowing them to feel as if they were fully involved in the restaurant. It’s this sense of connection brokered by an exchange of tastes that seems to be integral to the degree of warm feeling many have for the place and for Fumi herself.

Director Kikuchi frequently switches between testimonials from regular customers some going back decades and many remarking on the incongruous sight of Fumi herself, a small woman battling a giant wok in the centre of the kitchen. All these years later and despite the expanded capacity there are always queues to get in while customers claim that there are dishes they might not otherwise care for or actively dislike but that Fumi alone can make appetising. She attributes her skill to her upbringing in a Taiwanese family where her sisters joke their father had a gambling problem and didn’t work but did do most of the family cooking. She picks up new ideas on trips to the island nation and on one occasion visits a Taiwanese woman to experience more home cooking who also points out that cooking is imbued with emotion. Fumi’s own enthusiasm and love of the craft finds its way in, delivering care and attention to her customers who just as often may be looking for somewhere to belong as much as a good meal.

The film otherwise does not pry too much into Fumi’s personal life, never stepping too far outside the restaurant save for exploring her relationship with nephew Kazuyoshi and three younger sisters as well as her soon to be 100-year-old mother who was responsible for the restaurant’s constant supply of Taiwanese sausages. Food is a family affair, the now elderly women recalling the dishes they remember from their childhood and putting on a large spread for New Year. Yet the restaurant is also a kind of home for Fumi, one she admits she was reluctant to leave. She’d never considered a successor, but later came round to the idea of entrusting it to her nephew and head chef. 

As other guests remark, food a means of building body and soul. The nourishing wholesomeness of Fumi’s cooking seems to have a positive effect on those who visit the restaurant which was often home to various celebrities from the illustrators and designers of the surrounding area to the top stars of the day such as Tora-san himself, not to mention sustaining her mother to the ripe old age of almost a century. Guests describe her as a radiant character, like someone in an animation, an improbably small woman filled with a warmth that draws others to her offering comfort and connection through food but also an artist whose medium was cooking creating a series of unique dishes that couldn’t be found anywhere else yet quickly offering to teach anyone who wanted to know how to make them. A tribute to a bygone era, Kikuchi captures a sense of nostalgia for simple pleasures but equally of pleasure in the moment for as Fumi says to eat is to live.

Gifts from the Kitchen screened as part of this year’s Camera Japan.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

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.