"Is This the Golden Age for New Directors?" The People Trying to Make Good Films Have No Answer — But Plenty to Say

Why they ended up on this road, and why they are willing to give it their time.

From July 20 to 30, morning to night, a few movie theaters in Xicheng District, Xining, in Qinghai province, kept screening "special films." The audiences were fairly special too: the crews whose films were showing, journalists, film companies shopping for titles, and some ordinary movie fans.

By its 11th edition, the FIRST International Film Festival had come to look a lot like an independent film festival. Forty-five films made the lineup, and after every screening, festival executive officer Li Ziwei would join the director on stage to take questions. Before each film she repeated, as always, the same ceremonious opening line: "When the lights go down, the film is before your eyes; when the lights come up, the film is in your heart."

"Is this the golden age for new directors?" One forum at the festival put exactly that stirring question on its banner.

New directors were indeed what everyone was watching. Their wildly different backgrounds look out of place in today's film industry, yet the work they brought was, without exception, praised as "sincere, full of breakthrough, willing to catch the real world and real feeling." Before ordinary audiences even knew where to watch these films, the people who made them were already getting the kind of feedback that comes from kindred spirits.

QDaily put the same set of questions to eight of these filmmakers. What we wanted to know was simple: in the present climate, what are they actually thinking?

They decided to make the first film of their lives: "This year goes by, next year goes by — and then what?"

Cai Chengjie was this year's big winner at FIRST. His film The Widowed Witch, an absurd, magical fable, took both Best Narrative Feature and Best Director.

Until now, Cai, 37, directed legal-education dramas for the state broadcaster CCTV, but he had been preparing for this dream for years: "People say, how did you just turn up out of nowhere with a film? It really wasn't out of nowhere. I've wanted to get into the industry for ten years, and I spent those ten years looking for the chance."

Cai finished the script before this year's Chinese New Year and started shooting on the eighth day of the new year, back home in Pingquan County, Hebei province. The budget he and his cinematographer and partner Jiao Feng put up between them covered only nine days of shooting. But for those nine days, he shot it his way.

He told QDaily: "For a first film, whatever else happens, you have to shoot it standing up straight. A debut should be something free."

Asked why the urge hit him this year, and why he didn't take the lower barrier some other newcomers take — starting on video sites and working around to features — Cai gave a plain answer: "At my age, I think it's time to actually do what I want to do." "Otherwise it just gets harder to bear. You turn 40, then 50, and you look at other people, and it feels even worse."

"This year goes by, next year goes by — and then what?"

The same urge was on Zhou Ziyang's mind when he quit the company he'd been drifting through in 2013 and began writing the script for Old Beast in earnest: "In 2013 I turned 30, quit my job, got married. Finding investment wasn't easy at first, but by then I was getting older, and so were the friends around me. They saw how stubbornly I was going after this, and they were all willing to help. Back then I thought, whatever it takes, I have to get this film made by 2016."

Zhou was luckier, though. He heard about the FIRST festival's pitching session — and there, last year, he met director Wang Xiaoshuai, who liked the Old Beast script and was willing to put money in.

There is another kind of story here as well. The young often start out on nothing but recklessness, whatever comes of it. Cui Yongyuan, who hosted the awards ceremony, made a point of mentioning "a film that cost only 4,000 yuan" — he meant Nanjing South (《南京南》), directed by the college student Zhang Wenlong.

Zhang Wenlong flatly calls his own film "garbage." In truth it is far from a finished piece of work, but it has its flashes. Zhang caught a confusion common to himself and many of his contemporaries and wrote it straight into a line of dialogue: "What are you going to do after graduation?" "No idea. Open a braised-chicken-rice place, maybe."

Every director holds a different "key" to the work

"Absurd" — that was the word audiences reached for after both The Widowed Witch and Old Beast.

Yet the two films arrive there by completely different routes: the first through an imitation folk tale full of gods, spirits and strange forces; the second through a complicated father.

Béla Tarr, the Hungarian director of The Turin Horse, says what cinema insists on above all is "different individuals." He once told his students: "It's the 21st century, there are no limits on making a film anymore, you can shoot one on a phone. So go and do it, don't be afraid, be free… You need to build your own way of shooting films, and your own understanding of cinema."

Several of the directors had their own versions of this.

Cai Chengjie wanted a distinctive shape to hold his story up: "I really like looking for more Eastern ways of telling a story — imitating the verdict poems in Dream of the Red Chamber, say, where the outcome is set down for you in advance, and later you come back and see, oh, this person was there all along."

He was after the alluring "many meanings" that blank space creates: "Take Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio — it tells you about a person, a fox spirit. It gives you a plain little story that leaves you wanting more. But inside it you can see human nature, see real character, and different people can read it differently."

Zhou Ziyang's starting point may be more private, and more emotional. In recent years he has felt keenly that in his hometown, Hohhot, economic growth left people's inner lives warped and broken, and the ties between them began to change.

Zhou had lived through that kind of break himself: his college entrance exam was ruled a zero because of an "accident," and that same year his closest friend died in a car crash. After repeating the year and getting into college, "I started watching art films by the pile, reading philosophy… I seemed to take some kind of revelation from them, and without knowing it I wanted to make a film like this. I wanted to use film to tell the people who matter most to me what life is, and what I understand fate to be."

Like every other art, film can help work off people's confusion — the audience's and the maker's alike.

The Foolish Bird, directed by Huang Ji with her husband Ryuji Otsuka, won the award for Best Artistic Exploration. It follows Lin Sen, a 16-year-old "left-behind" girl in a small Hunan town who wants to be loved, steals a phone and sells it to a man she doesn't know, and is put through a brutal ordeal because of it.

Huang Ji told QDaily: "What the film is really about is a woman who, as she grows up, doesn't know what she wants — but she wants something. And all through that search she has to lean on someone: first a friend, then a boy, and she tries leaning on her mother, her grandfather, and, most of all, in the middle, she leans on a phone… But by the end she finds that leaning on any of them is useless. She can only rely on herself."

That is almost Huang Ji's own path. She left her hometown, graduated from film school, and made two films, Egg and Stone and The Foolish Bird, both about what she cares about most: a girl's family ties, friendships and loves, and the longing and sexual confusion of growing up in a small town. The confusion Huang Ji once carried has been let out, piece by piece. That is why she calls herself lucky: "I found a way to convert it."

Ideals, money, ability, collaboration, combat… and even "dumb luck"

Well before the festival, the documentary Plastic China had already made its name through a 28-minute "media cut" circulating online. Shot over three years and made over a full six, the film looks at China's imported waste-plastic recycling business, and it won the Special Jury Award in the First Appearance competition at the 29th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the largest documentary festival in the world.

Director Wang Jiuliang prefers to call his work a "project" — video, writing and photographs are all means to an end. The end is very direct: "How do you take your project and run it through the media's megaphone so that everyone sees the fact, and that in turn forces policy to change."

Talking with the audience after the screening, Wang, carried away, said as if reciting an article of faith: "Born to be human."

When QDaily interviewed him afterwards, he said the starting point must be goodwill: "You carry this beautiful wish, you open your eyes to see a beautiful world, right? We all think like that. Then you find the beautiful world has small flaws in it, like a painting — if you cover the small flaws over it only gets more perfect, rather than the whole view being darkness, enemies everywhere. I don't think it's that. Anyone who gets that angry is bound to be someone bent on good, someone who wants everything to be beautiful. That bullshit 'positive energy' — that is absolutely not stupidity, it's malice."

He wouldn't talk about specific difficulties, though even danger was "an everyday thing." He thinks that is exactly where a director's ability shows: "That's combat — the stronger your opponent, the stronger you get. Like playing ping-pong. You just face the problems, you go to the battlefield, you fight, right? You spend the money, and when the money's gone you go find more. If you're able, you find it; if you're not, you don't."

Wang Jiuliang was born in 1976 into a farming family in Shandong. He saved up his college tuition selling phones and vegetables, and only at 26 enrolled at the Communication University of China to study photography. His photography of the 2000s, including Rebirth (《往生》) and Beijing Besieged by Waste, drew attention. Feeling that moving images carried more force, in 2010 he turned Beijing Besieged by Waste into a documentary, and after that came Plastic China.

Wang says the biggest change in him over these years is recognizing "the necessity of working with others": "I realized this is no longer a time that produces lone heroes. This is an evil time, and the bigger and harder the thing you're trying to do, the more you need other people."

But asked how he kept it up for six years, Wang Jiuliang said: "It's not that I kept it up. I got lucky and dodged it. Nobody who walks off a battlefield calls it victory. They were just lucky enough not to die."

"A memorandum for the next generation's age of peace and prosperity"

Ruby Chen came to the festival as the producer of both Plastic China and The Foolish Bird.

She is one of the founders of the CNEX Chinese Documentary Pitching Forum. CNEX works rather like a documentary foundation, with offices in Hong Kong, Taipei and Beijing. It raises around US$1.5 million a year from sponsors and other sources, and sets an annual theme ("Promise and Commitment" in 2017) to solicit filmmakers across the region. It has produced two well-known works by the independent director Du Haibin: Umbrella, about farmers trying to break free of the land that binds them, and 1428, about the Wenchuan earthquake.

As CNEX's current executive officer, Ruby Chen described to QDaily the intention behind its founding — also the slogan displayed prominently on its website: "A memorandum for the next generation's age of peace and prosperity." "We felt the Chinese-speaking world in the 21st century was bound to go through a burst of development, and along the way all sorts of things, good and bad, were bound to happen. A documentary is a good memorandum of what happened."

"The second reason is to talk to the young people of today, and to the young people of the future. We felt that communicating through images was already an unavoidable trend, so rather than wait passively, we might as well move first." "In China, especially for everyone born after 1980, basically there were no disasters after they were born — life has run fairly smoothly for them, and while growing up they took in an enormous amount of imagery. Much of how they understand the world comes through images."

Ruby Chen explained how they pick the filmmakers they work with: "The first thing we weigh is whether the subject matters. Then, whether the director is capable enough. Third, whether the help we can offer will be useful or useless. That's our starting point — there's still a long road before a film is finished."

While their elders talk about "the decline of Taiwanese cinema," what are newcomers supposed to do?

When the Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen, one of the jurors, went on stage to present an award, his remarks were rueful — about a market that had changed direction, about "Taiwanese cinema heading into decline." Host Cui Yongyuan made the same point in a teasing tone while introducing Nansun Shi: "I see that the films you produced include Dragon Gate Inn — a wonderful film. Ever since that film, Hong Kong cinema has been in decline."

Newcomers feel it more directly. Zhan Jinglin, director of the Taiwanese film Island in the Stream (《川流之岛》), described to QDaily the turbulence outside film itself: "The economy really has fallen off a cliff these past few years, and young people especially get emotional about it, so Taiwan has had a lot of social incidents lately — random killings, that kind of thing. A lot of young people can't see a future. They feel society hasn't made them any promise, like: grind for five years, ten years, and you'll get somewhere. So they feel particularly hopeless."

Island in the Stream is itself set against Taiwan's "national highway toll collectors" affair: on December 30, 2013, after Taiwan's national highways switched entirely to distance-based electronic tolling, the former toll collectors lost their jobs, which in reality set off a long-running protest movement. The film doesn't dwell on the protest. It portrays a woman toll collector who, amid the pain of losing her job and of her son being accused of "rape," begins a money-driven sexual relationship with a bus driver. At the end, the toll booth flickering under passing headlights looks like an island in the stream of traffic.

Zhan Jinglin admits the heavy sense of suppression in the film, and its air of "fixed social class," were "definitely influenced" by what he perceives around him: "Because you live in that place."

On Taiwan's film market he is perhaps even more "pessimistic": it has "basically never been good." With no work going, actors take jobs in coffee shops. And even the film companies that carry weight are, next to the big mainland companies, "all small companies."

Yet what really stands against the "decline" story is that both Island in the Stream and Missing Johnny — the two Taiwanese films nominated for Best Narrative Feature and other awards — show mature control: complete, fluent films.

Worth noting: Nansun Shi also singled out last year's Hong Kong film Mad World (even though its subject is real-life pain, nothing like the romance of Dragon Gate Inn).

Zhan Jinglin says that if you don't want to treat film "merely as a profession," it is the same everywhere: "you have to be extremely, extremely stubborn." Island in the Stream is also this 37-year-old director's first film. He walked away from the law career his family expected of him, spent six years on a graduate degree in image arts, started making films at 30, and turned down one marketable genre script after another — youth romances, thrillers — that he couldn't stand behind.

His first film was shot in just 13 days. Strictly speaking it is a "TV movie," made for CTS. But Zhan says he didn't care what it counted as; he was going to shoot what he wanted to say regardless.

Near the end of the interview, Zhan Jinglin brought up one fact that would make mainland filmmakers envious: "Yesterday I was talking with Zhang Dalei, the director of The Summer Is Gone (Zhang says he comes back to FIRST every year to watch films), and he envies Taiwanese movie theaters — they put up posters of art-house masters, and not for any special event. Art films in Taiwan get regular screening slots, and there's a steady audience that goes to see them."

"Is this the golden age for new directors?"

That was the subject set for an "industry forum" during the festival.

The director Cao Baoping, the producer Nansun Shi and Chen Hongwei, deputy general manager of Tencent Pictures, spoke as panelists. Almost every answer leaned toward yes. Cao Baoping said newcomers today are far luckier than he was in his day: there are pitching sessions, a bigger market, it's the best of times.

But asked what they made of well-reviewed films like Brotherhood of Blades 2 and Da Hu Fa both failing at the box office this summer, Chen Hongwei picked up the thread with "there's no need to lose confidence," while Cao Baoping said: "Who can answer a question that big?"

Asked how he sees the film industry, Cai Chengjie was just as guarded: "To be at a film festival and meet people who are still this pure, still have ideals, and films like these — here you don't feel so alone. A lot of people genuinely say, 'Hey, I saw your film, can we talk about it?' I think this place is a genuinely happy one."

Wang Jiuliang answered in his own register, "despairing" but full of life: "Our ecosystem right now is terrible. You feel it — what is there to see, year after year? How are you supposed to admire flowers in a desert? Isn't it a cultural desert?… But still, as the saying goes, it's all 'the times and fate.' Since we've run into it, we find a way."

"Freedom" is still the subject that leaves everyone uneasy

Every director we talked to brought up "freedom" in the work, in a tone that was cautious, perhaps, but not open to argument.

"If there's no freedom, why bother creating at all?" said the Taiwanese director Zhan Jinglin.

Yet when a new director asked him what advice he had about "creating freely," jury chairman Lou Ye — who made a point of saying he liked the festival's "run wild" slogan — said: "I don't have any advice. I have no ideas, no advice, I don't know what to do myself. The one thing you can do, maybe, is pick up a camera and shoot — shoot the film you want to make. That's my only piece of advice."

Images from film stills and the festival's official Weibo account.