YIDFF awards

[amnornes@umich.edu]

Quoting Wei Ting Jen <intewig at gmail.com>:

> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Wang Bing winning the Grand Prize again -
> doesn't that mean that Chinese directors have won three straight in a
> row now? Wang Bing in '03 and '07, and the Flood documentary in '05.
>
> And I note that the Asian currents section was won by another Flood
> documentary too - how did other KineJapan members find these films?
> According to my friends in the Chinese doc industry the three
> Gorges/Flood theme has become very overdone and trite, would be
> interested to see if the directors did anything special to merit this
> top prize.

Trite? I don't think so. Overdone? It probably depends on how many you 
have access to. Bingai was a very good film that centered on a woman 
with an incredibly strong personality. The director, Feng Yan, 
translated the Chikuma Shobo collection of hatsugen by Ogawa Shinsuke. 
Although this was published in Taiwan for lack of interest in the PRC, 
the book ended up having an enormous impact on Chinese 
documentary----or so I'm told. It could therefore be that Feng had an 
inside line on the prize; her film is also about resistance to the 
expropriation of farmland for enormous works of civil engineering, and 
one of the jurors was Byung Young-ju, an Ogawa Pro fan who shot her 
first films on Ogawa's camera. It was also noted that the Award of 
Excellence was given to a film that is the mirror image----struggles 
around a village where the sea is receding, forcing fishermen to 
contemplate becoming farmers.

I'm afraid that the latter film was hard to watch. However, I thought 
Feng's film was quite good. Significantly, it also won the new 
Community Cinema Award. This is jurored by some key people in the 
independent screening scene in Japan, people whose opinions I greatly 
respect. The prize money, interestingly enough, must be used to pave 
the way for exhibition in Japan. Great idea. In any case, I was talking 
to a couple of the jurors, and they had no idea about Feng's 
connections to Ogawa and Yamagata. They simply liked the film.

So I sense that the Chinese films were deserving of the awards. I want 
to address the Wang Bing film, which is something akin to the Citizen 
Kane of Talking Heads Documentary.

But I will do that in a separate message, a third message after a 
second one containing Hasumi's speech at the awards ceremony.

Markus