He's Won Many Awards for His Documentaries. What He Records Is Absurdity.

Zhou Hao doesn't agree with the domestic directors who keep railing against censorship. “It's just there, blocking your way, and you can't get around it. So are you going to stop making films?”

In 2007, under then-mayor Geng Yanbo, large-scale demolition and rebuilding began in Datong, an ancient capital that had prospered in its day. After Geng was abruptly transferred to be mayor of Taiyuan in 2013, the plans stalled, and to this day the city holds wide tracts of unfinished ruins and abandoned building sites.

Zhou Hao's camera caught the story with Geng at its center, and it became The Chinese Mayor (《大同》), which won Best Documentary at the 2015 Golden Horse Awards and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. He had already won in 2014 for Cotton (《棉花》), which followed the women who pick cotton, the workers in jeans factories, and others along the cotton supply chain — making Zhou the first documentary director to win the Golden Horse two years running.

Zhou Hao, 48 and a native of Guizhou, is one of the longest-working documentary directors in China, and the one who has ranged over the widest set of subjects. In a little more than a decade he has filmed workers, farmers, drug dealers, hospitals, police officers, officials, and students. Each film drills a single core sample out of society, a way of looking in on an era that is changing at speed.

From Photojournalist to Filmmaker

Before he tried making documentaries in 2001, Zhou Hao spent more than a decade as a journalist. From 1992 on he worked as a photographer at Guizhou Daily, Xinhua News Agency, Southern Weekly, and 21st Century Business Herald, among other outlets. He caught the golden age of print. In 2003, before the United States went to war in Iraq, he and two other reporters were the only Chinese print journalists there.

The outlets he worked for were already among the best in the country and his career looked smooth, but he had decided photography was not the storytelling tool he was best at, and the idea of switching jobs took shape.

“The reason I switched back then was that I wasn't especially good at taking photographs — I felt there were some [photography] masters standing in front of me, blocking my progress.” He had his eye on ground nobody had broken. When he entered China's documentary business in the 2000s, Chinese-language material on it was very scarce, directors were few, and teachers fewer; the ones ahead of him were “maybe only five people.” A dozen years of growth later, there are more than 20 documentary directors in China with real achievements behind them, at a level similar to his.

Another push came from No. 16 Barkhor South Street (《八廓南街 16 号》). Shot by Duan Jinchuan in the 1990s, the film watches the staff of a residential committee in Lhasa at work — public security, family planning, population management, cleaning up street stalls. That tiny committee opened a window onto the logic of grassroots government. Zhou watched it and thought: “If I'm going to make films, I should make films like this.”

In 2002 he finished his first film, Houjie (《厚街》), about the lives of migrant workers in Dongguan; it won Best New Director at the 2003 Yunnan Multi Culture Visual Festival. Senior Year (《高三》), from 2005, recorded the high-pressure life of a graduating class at a high school in Fujian and won Best Documentary at the 2006 Hong Kong International Film Festival. It is also his most-tagged film on Douban, and it was this landmark work that brought him into public view. He went on to make Using (《龙哥》, 2009), The Transition Period (《书记》, 2009), The Police Station (《差馆》, 2010), The Days (《日子》, 2011), and The Emergency Ward (《急诊室》, 2013), along with Cotton and The Chinese Mayor.

On Zhihu he gave his career so far a fairly contented review. Asked, “How would you evaluate the documentary director Zhou Hao?” he wrote, “Heh, there are about nine films I recognize as my own” — which is to say, all of them. At any given stage, he believes, he could only have made the films he made. “I won't put them down too much, and I won't talk them up too much either. What's past is past.”

Two Golden Horse awards have made his name known to more people, but he keeps his public appearances to a minimum. Last Thursday he sat on the jury of the Shanghai TV Festival. He hadn't planned to walk the red carpet and had brought only casual clothes; Xu Zheng insisted, and sent a young woman to take him to a bridal shop on Renmin Road, where he rented a suit for 300 yuan.

“You have to respect other people — I came, so I'll play their game. It feels like everyone's playing house, but this isn't the game of house I want to play,” he said.

Documentary directing is not a rich profession. For Zhou, the Golden Horse helps lay the groundwork for finding money and opportunities for the next film, but it earns nowhere near what narrative features do. Still, he says, “At my age, having a house and a car with no mortgage — that's pretty good.”

Recording the Daily Life of a Chinese Mayor

“In this ‘op-doc,’ he isn't a stiff, formal official delivering one grandiose speech after another. We see him as a real person, with his own ideals, emotions, difficulties, and conceits.” That is how The Chinese Mayor's producer, Zhao Qi, and Zhou Hao described the Geng Yanbo they put on screen, writing in The New York Times.

But because Geng had been moved to Taiyuan, Zhou Hao declined to say anything to QDaily about the film he had made about him. He seemed wary.

The Chinese Mayor's vantage point is a rare one. To most ordinary people, how government actually works is a black box, and few filmmakers get to watch a senior Chinese official's daily life this closely, for this long, then record it vividly and bring it to a general audience. In that sense, the film was bound to become a talking point from the moment Geng agreed to be filmed.

Geng's huge city-building campaign in Datong earned him praise and blame in equal measure. He was hardworking, wanted to get things done, and was even something of an idealist. In the film he often comes home in the small hours and gets up at four; his wife cries as she pleads with him to stop. He moved fast to start demolitions, rebuild the city walls, and protect cultural relics. His term was finite, and whenever a project ran into trouble he grew anxious — “How much time do I have left in Datong?”

And yet thousands of homes came down; the demolitions moved 500,000 residents, 30 percent of Datong's population; the debt reached an unprecedented scale, in the tens of billions of yuan; and the competing interests were tangled. Years after he left Datong, people there still argue about his name.

Through Geng's daily life, Zhou shows how complicated and contradictory the government system is, and how officials use power.

“‘I would rather be a centurion than a scholar’ — that's a line from Yang Xiu… Look, Geng Yanbo waved his hand and the city wall went up. Ah, incredible.” A middle-aged man practicing calligraphy with water in the square gestured behind him at the freshly rebuilt wall. Outside Geng's residence, people crowded around him, handing over documents and describing their problems; when he signed off on how each should be handled, the crowd applauded, satisfied. Some read this as praise for the official who cares for his people like a parent. Others frowned.

The Chinese Mayor gives flesh and blood to the figure of the “leader,” and it also frees its portrayal of “the masses” from stock formulas. In the usual reporting on demolition, the households being moved out and the holdouts who refuse to go appear as victims who deserve sympathy. In fact there are also quiet beneficiaries, there are less-than-dignified tactics for defending one's interests, and there are motives behind the slogans that are more practical than the slogans admit.

After Geng was abruptly transferred away in February 2013, for instance, many people in Datong took to the streets with chants and banners; the campaign to keep him went on for nearly a week. One exchange between a mother and her son at a bus stop is worth dwelling on. Amid shouts of “Mayor Geng, come back!” a small boy, annoyed that the crowd had made it impossible to get on the bus, stamped his feet:

— “What are they doing?”

— “They want houses. Mayor Geng's gone, so no one will give them houses, and they're upset.”

When Zhou Hao Makes Documentaries, His Role Is to Be a Plain-Line Sketcher

Never handing down a black-and-white verdict on a person is his habit as a director: cool, expressionless, sometimes deliberately laying a subject's lies on the table for the audience to weigh. A film that decides everything in advance, he thinks, insults the audience's intelligence.

His position as a director, he says, does not give him the privilege of judging on the audience's behalf. “You just need to be a plain-line sketcher — you don't need to make the judgment, and you're not capable of it either.”

He likes Peter Hessler, the former New Yorker correspondent in China who wrote the “China trilogy.” They work in different media, but their ways of telling China have a similar flavor: enter through small lives to show a large era, plenty of human warmth, the edge hidden behind gentle, restrained narration.

Another effect of plain-line narration is that the same story can set off completely opposite reactions in different audiences. What people have said about Senior Year is the clearest example.

“When I first showed it to people they called it an inspirational film, and it made me angry — that's not what I was filming. To this day 80 percent of people say it's an inspirational film, and that 80 percent is probably mostly students. It's really not surprising; I can name five or six different reactions right now. Japanese viewers watched it and thought, my god, how lucky I am not to have grown up in that education system. When I screened it in the United States, someone in the audience asked where he could hire these Chinese kids — he thought they'd make excellent employees who do what the boss says. Europeans watched it as a horror film. Chinese people in their forties see it differently again: some kids hate that teacher, but I think 95 percent of parents would want their child in his class. And an American told me it's a political film. I asked why, and he said one exam can decide the future of a whole group of people, and that's what politics is.” Zhou Hao said this in an interview in 2009.

For work that stays this close to social reality, one question can't be avoided: how do you keep from crossing the line? Next to the domestic films that take an activist position and call for social reform, Zhou Hao's documentaries look “objective,” and the many readings they allow have kept them out of trouble.

He denies that this is a cleverer, better-hidden way of saying things. He simply isn't a radical person. “I don't think I'm smarter than they are, and my IQ isn't higher than theirs. A film shows you the person who made it — what kind of person you are, that's the kind of film you make. Everyone is different, and I think that's a sign of a thriving field.”

He doesn't agree with the domestic directors who keep railing against censorship. “It's just there, blocking your way, and you can't get around it. So are you going to stop making films?”

Absurdity Is Everywhere; There's Nowhere You Can't Film

Without exception, every subject Zhou Hao has chosen carries the color of a large historical moment behind it, and that is what excites him about them. He starts with small lives, but his ambition doesn't stop at small lives, and he puts that down to his years as a reporter: “From the start I was definitely thinking that I'm not making a film about one person. I'm making a film about the people of that era.”

The two films he has in progress — one about left-behind children, one about retail stock investors — still work the same way: use ordinary people's stories to talk about social phenomena.

His reporting background may help him smell out subjects loaded with dramatic conflict, but he says he doesn't go looking for subjects thick with absurdity. Absurdity is everywhere, stories are everywhere, and there is no more absurdity in his films than in life.

“Why is art supposed to be above life? Art is a misunderstanding of life — a distortion of it, even. Real life hands you surprises everywhere. Most of my films have stories with sharp turns in them, and it can look like luck. It isn't. The world just changes this fast,” he said.

When he made Senior Year, the college entrance exam was still an unremarkable subject, even though it reaches nearly every Chinese family through someone. During an interview in the lobby of a five-star hotel in Shanghai, he pointed at the front desk and rattled off an idea for splicing together a hotel where the average stay costs 2,000 yuan and a small Shanghai inn that charges 50 yuan a day. “There's nowhere you can't film.”

And if there really are no turns in the story? His method is to wait. In the new film about retail investors, the scenes and faces he has so far are very much the same: a private-fund manager handling a few hundred million yuan, sitting at home day after day tapping a keyboard, a man who has been through enough to watch the market rise and fall without changing expression.

“I think there'll be a way to express it. Slowly, no hurry. There will be, for sure,” he said.

It may be true that there's nowhere you can't film, but not everyone can squeeze value out of an ordinary subject, and Zhou Hao has unusual confidence in his own angle on one: “As long as someone lets me in to observe, as long as I get the chance to get in, I'll find my angle.” No subject is one he must film, and none is one he never would.

For The Transition Period he asked Guo Yongchang, the party secretary of Gushi County in Henan, for the same filming access as the county television station. He caught precisely the mood in Guo's office: a property developer who had planned a 26-story tower, faced with the secretary's inexplicable fondness for the number 33 — a near-homophone of shengsheng, “life upon life” — nodded along and hurried to say, “It doesn't matter, add them, add them.” Seven more floors were settled in under two minutes.

Another trait the press often mentions is his “approachability.” Documentary filmmaking invades other people's lives, he says, which runs against human nature, and prying someone's mouth open is a problem. Because that is his judgment on the ethics of the form, the way he talks to his subjects comes close to asking their forgiveness. He persuades them that the film isn't his alone but theirs too, made together; out of every ten people, one or two will open up to him. It is also an effective strategy: once a subject accepts the idea, everything afterwards goes far more openly and smoothly.

Some documentary directors hide their purpose from the people they film. He considers that putting up a barrier of your own making. “All of it should happen with the other person's consent. And I've never liked what reporters call muckraking. What is muckraking? It's standing yourself at an unimaginable height and exercising your power as God's deputy. What makes you think you see life more clearly, or live more cleverly, than anyone else?”

“Chinese Characteristics” Is a Narrow Idea

Zhou Hao's films are full of “Chinese characteristics” scenes that look as though they could only happen in China, and that only Chinese people can understand with a bitter laugh. But he thinks “nation” is a narrow idea that doesn't need underlining, and his later films will actually try to be “de-Sinicized.”

His current choice of “Chinese characteristics” material isn't deliberate, he says. It's just that “these are the only filming conditions I have. The way I couldn't choose my parents, couldn't choose my country, couldn't choose my mother tongue — and my English is terrible too. This environment is the only one where I can push things as far as they'll go.”

He would rather talk about human nature. Take Using, for example — the English title of 《龙哥》. It tells the story of the friendship, the help, the using, and the suspicion between him and a drug user called Brother Long. “In the end the impression of Guangzhou as a city is very faint, very faint. What is it finally about? It's about a story between two men, about the question of how people deal with one another. People in other countries watch it and know this story could happen in any big city in the world.”

Meeting foreign documentary directors and going to film events abroad has left him feeling that “talking about regional issues is too small.” Every winter, at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in the Netherlands, documentaries from all over the world sit side by side, on every subject imaginable. What stayed with him was a screening there of a documentary about China's Cultural Revolution — more than three hours, long-winded, rambling — which he could barely sit through, while the foreign audience watched it eagerly from beginning to end and asked question after question.

He envies these foreigners and their enormous appetite to know about the world outside.

“I'm not sure I can really stand at some higher level and look at the world as it is now. But I hope for myself, I imagine myself, stepping back just a little to look at these questions.”

Images from: Sundance Film Festival, Douban