Rough Reality for China’s Indie Documentaries | Film
Indie filmmakers have been turning out works of high social value, but is their golden age over?
In 1990, a group of down-and-out Beijing artists sparked one of China’s lesser-known revolutions.
Between 1988 and 1990, former TV director Wu Wenguang had filmed five visual and performing artists who had migrated to Beijing from various parts of China. Mainstream society dismissed them as mangliu (盲流), or “vagrants,” who had dropped out of the state-sponsored work system. But so had Wu—who shot independently of state-run studios, used borrowed cameras and editing suites, and distributed the finished product¸ Bumming in Beijing, privately among friends and media professionals.
Not for nothing is Bumming considered China’s first “independent documentary”—that is, a film about non-fictional subjects made without a permit, funding, or creative direction from one of China’s eight state-run film studios (which at the time had annual quotas on permits they gave out for documentaries), according to director and influential film writer Zhang Laodong, founder of film blog Aotu Doc.
Digital Subscription