The Pingyao International Film Festival: Jia Zhangke's Connections, the Local Government's Business

Over eight days, what happened at Jia Zhangke's Pingyao International Film Festival?

Pingyao — and Cai Chunrong — will remember what they owe Jia Zhangke. Otherwise a man like Marco Müller would never have come to Pingyao at all, let alone given Cai the chance to pose with him for a photo.

Cai Chunrong and her husband run a small snack shop just outside the old town of Pingyao. They take turns cooking in the back, selling knife-cut noodles, oil-braised pork and oat-flour rolls — all Shanxi specialties.

Starting on October 27, 2017, foreigners of every description began turning up to eat at their shop. One of them, an old man with white hair and a white beard, looked especially spry. "His Chinese was very good. The moment he walked in he wanted lamb dumplings. Our local lamb isn't like the foreign kind, and he liked it." Cai felt honored to be popular with guests from abroad.

On the evening of October 28, her husband spotted the foreigner on television and hurried to call her over. "Goodness, I never imagined he was such an important man."

Marco Müller, an Italian, is 64 this year and has run several film festivals, Venice among them. He first came to China in the 1970s. The international honors won by Chinese films such as Yellow Earth and Raise the Red Lantern, it is said, owed a great deal to his recommendations and legwork behind the scenes.

He came to Pingyao to help his old friend Jia Zhangke put on the Pingyao International Film Festival. The festival poster read: "Year One of Pingyao."

1

On a map, Shanxi province looks like a leaf standing on end. Pingyao sits right in the middle of it.

During the Western Zhou dynasty, Yin Jifu built defensive works here while leading a campaign north. Under the Qin and Han, the government ran it as a prefecture. Under the Sui and Tang, rammed-earth ramparts went up to hold off Turkic raids, and by the Tang and Song they had joined into a complete wall; the Ming and Qing added to it again. What remains is the wall around Pingyao's old town, more than 6,000 meters in circumference.

Locals say that in the 1990s someone proposed tearing the wall down to expand the commercial district, and that the plan died because the old wall was too solid and demolishing it would have cost too much.

Today the old town of Pingyao is one of "the four best-preserved ancient cities in China," and Shanxi's biggest tourism calling card.

Around 2013, profit margins across the national coal industry kept sliding and Shanxi's "golden decade" of coal was declared over; that year close to 50% of coal companies were losing money. The industry cleanup and the anti-corruption campaign that followed finished off the coal economy Shanxi had lived on.

With coal no longer dependable, the local government turned to "cultural transformation," and Pingyao — long ignored because it had no coal — stepped to the front of the stage.

Beijing to Pingyao is four hours by high-speed rail. From the provincial capital, Taiyuan, it is three stops and 30 minutes. In a Shanxi ringed by the Taihang range, that counts as easy to reach.

2

At 14, Jia Zhangke, a boy from Fenyang, had just learned to ride a bicycle. He rode a whole day to Xiaoyi, the neighboring county thirty li away, to look at a train. "Finally a slow coal train came rumbling past us, and as the sound faded into the distance it became a kind of summons. For us the railway meant the future, faraway places, hope."

Many years later, by then a leading figure of the Sixth Generation of Chinese directors, Jia Zhangke would bring up that train again and again. In 2015 he went back to Fenyang and posted on Weibo that he had made up his mind to move out of Beijing.

Jia now spends much of his time in Fenyang, the place he wanted to escape as a boy. Apart from trips abroad to collect prizes, he writes here, chewing over large questions like "the value of consensus" and "why elite society declines."

More often, like every shrewd Shanxi businessman, he deals with the government and runs his companies. In the "Jiajiazhuang Cultural and Ecological Tourism Zone," in Jiajiazhuang township four kilometers outside the county seat, there is Mountains May Depart Family Kitchen, a restaurant he holds a stake in that serves Fenyang and Shanxi food; there are also the Jia Zhangke Art Center and the Seed Cinema, both of which he invested in, which put on local art shows and screen art-house films. They share a compound with a memorial hall for Ma Feng, a well-known local writer, and together they form part of China's second batch of "distinctive towns."

When the idea of running his own festival first came to him, he settled on Fenyang as the site right away.

This time, though, the Jinzhong municipal government moved far faster than Lüliang. While Fenyang was still hesitating, in September 2016 Jinzhong and Pingyao county had already carried off Jia Zhangke — a "provincial-level tourism calling card" — and promptly signed the Pingyao International Film Festival Cooperation Framework Agreement with him.

That owes something to Pingyao's long-standing openness to deals of this kind. In 2011 the Pingyao government reached an agreement with the director Wang Chaoge and Zhang Yimou's Beijing Impression Creative Culture and Art Center to build the "Meet You in Pingyao" (《又见平遥》) cultural tourism zone outside the old town, which opened to the public in 2013. The live-performance project, which took an initial investment of 150 million yuan, turned a profit in its first year; by early 2017 its seats were more than 100% filled, and its 2016 revenue came close to the old town's own ticket takings. The old town drew 12 million visits in 2016.

Jia Zhangke, 47 this year, is not keen to talk about these tangled interests. All he says is: "Pingyao happens to sit right between Beijing and Xi'an, with a direct high-speed rail link. Setting out from Xi'an or from Beijing, the distance is the same either way — a little over three hours to the old town."

3

At 8pm on October 28, a car carrying Fan Bingbing rolled in slowly from outside the city walls, and the old diesel-engine factory in the southwest corner of Pingyao's old town gave itself over to carnival.

The plant had never held a crowd like this. The state-owned factory was built in the 1950s; at its height more than 1,500 workers were on the floor, and the slogan "In agriculture, learn from Dazhai" is still legible on a workshop wall. In the late 1990s it closed, the workers were laid off, and the site sat desolate for a decade. In 2005 the Pingyao International Photography Festival, drawn to its 798-like industrial air, made it a main exhibition ground. The 2017 Pingyao International Film Festival was its next chance.

A narrow road nearly 500 meters long was jammed with people who had heard there would be stars. They stood on both sides of the metal railings and broke into applause and cheers whenever the emcee read out a name like Zhou Bichang or Li Chen.

More than 300 security guards, police and paramilitary police keeping order stood in ranks on the other side of the railings, fielding one request after another to "just let me in for one look." Around 5pm some of the crowd had already rushed the barriers at the gate, and tickets and credentials quickly stopped mattering. As the crush grew, residents and tourists climbed the wall and squeezed into the Film Palace.

Seven o'clock was when the opening ceremony was supposed to begin. Fan Bingbing had finally arrived. With the roads outside the old town closed, her car had circled the town several times before it could enter the Film Palace. The temperature had dropped to 8 degrees Celsius and the moon on the horizon looked frozen white. Still, people could not hide their excitement, pulling out their phones to film the star in her dark green gown.

Fan Bingbing is the festival's ambassador. She met Jia Zhangke at this year's Cannes, sat through a small pitch he gave about the festival, and decided to lend him her name. Perhaps in return, Jia put Sky Hunter — which stars Fan and was directed by her boyfriend Li Chen — into the screening lineup.

The two of them are only a small sample of Jia Zhangke's network in the film business.

4

Leaving aside short films, documentaries and this year's Where Has Time Gone?, Jia Zhangke has made 12 features in 20 years. Only three have cleared the censors for release at home: Still Life, 24 City and Mountains May Depart. These films are good at the ordinary, uneventful lives of ordinary people in small county towns, and their plainness and honesty give them a sting.

But nothing limits whom Jia Zhangke knows. On the red carpet his wife, Zhao Tao, and his old friend Marco Müller received guests on his behalf — the director Feng Xiaogang (who brought the opening film, Youth), the director John Woo (who brought a restored print of A Better Tomorrow), the writer Liu Zhenyun, the singers Zhou Bichang and He Jie, the host Xu Gehui, the actress Song Dandan (whose stepdaughter, Chloé Zhao, had a film selected). Without exception, every one of them called themselves "a friend of Director Jia's."

Besides his friends in the industry, Jia Zhangke, a Shanxi man, knows how to handle officials. In his official remarks through the festival he never forgot to recite the list — "the Shanxi Provincial Party Committee Publicity Department, the Shanxi Provincial Press, Radio, Film and Television Administration, the Pingyao County Party Committee and County Government" — while Marco Müller's opening line at the press conference was simply: "Leaders, honored guests."

The officials were plainly pleased with their quick-witted fellow townsman. At the opening ceremony, Shanxi's vice governor and the head of the provincial Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television Administration, among others, sat in the open-air venue for a full hour from 8:30pm.

5

Jia Zhangke wants his festival to look like Cannes.

This regular on the international festival circuit says he decided four years ago to stage a festival in China. Like Cannes, with its 60-odd years of history, his festival would have a red carpet, stars, films — and a small-town party. "I went to the Berlin Film Festival at 27; it was my first trip to Europe. Everything was new. The architecture of Europe and of Berlin started me thinking about the relationship between culture and buildings. I found out the world was wide."

"I wanted to hold it in a small city. I wanted to prove a small city can run a film festival too, that small cities need one just as much."

Once the deal with the Pingyao government was done, Jia set up a new company in March 2017, called simply Pingyao Film Festival Co., Ltd., in partnership with Pingyao County's Rishengchang Culture and Tourism Investment Co., Ltd., with himself as the legal representative. Running it as a business gave Jia a measure of freedom.

From March to opening night, the team grew from two people to nearly 200, volunteers not included. Jia handed the selection of films and the artistic decisions to Marco Müller and kept for himself the job of handling relations up and down the line and holding the whole picture in view. On the poster and the visual design, on whether to hold a red carpet every day, on whether to copy Cannes and add a blue carpet, the team reported back to him at every stage.

The hardest part of running a festival in Pingyao was construction. Turning the Pingyao diesel-engine factory into the Pingyao Film Palace took the team half a year. "The hardest thing is that this place is inside the old town, so we had to think about heritage protection, which is a real nuisance. None of our buildings can be taller than the city wall — so what do we do if we want an IMAX screen?" said Wan Jiahuan, the festival's chief content officer. In the end they simply dug a large pit in the northwest corner of the yard.

The result was satisfying. As soon as the design from Tsinghua University's Architectural Design and Research Institute was approved, workers went at it day and night. By the 27th the cinema equipment and the Film Palace itself were finished. Besides the 1,500-seat open-air screening space there was the Spring in a Small Town hall, fitted with Belgian projection equipment — a 465-seat room with first-rate sound and picture.

This "Pingyao speed" obviously could not have happened without government backing, and Jia gave the government and his partners a good deal in return. Among the 45 films screened, alongside the expected "Melville Centenary Retrospective" and recent prizewinners from festivals elsewhere — and, of course, Sky Hunter — were two films financed by the Shanxi Film Studio: Depei (《德皮》) and Till the Mountains Crumble and Heaven Meets Earth (《山无棱天地合》). The first is about a village couple whose romance is blocked by family and clan; the second, originally titled I Am Xiao Yanzi (《我是小燕子》), is a coming-of-age film in which a group of high schoolers dress up as characters from My Fair Princess.

They were, respectively, the opening film of the "A Corner of Pingyao" section and an entry in the "New Generation" section.

6

The Pingyao festival is certainly not Cannes, nor Sundance, which many outlets compare it to, nor the San Sebastián International Film Festival, which Jia himself sometimes mentions.

Pingyao is Pingyao.

The festival's first day was a Saturday. Inside, the Film Palace felt like a country market. A ticket just to walk the grounds cost 30 yuan; watching a film meant exchanging it for another ticket. Tourists pouring in had no idea what was on that night, until a helpful local set them straight: "They're showing movies! Fan Bingbing's coming tonight!" A guard nearby in sunglasses and white gloves hurried to string up a cordon, shouting, "Move along, move along, don't stop by the road!"

In the halls, Melville's Bob le Flambeur was playing at the same hour as Where Has Time Gone?, the BRICS co-production Jia Zhangke produced. Outside, in a tent, sesame twists from Jiajiazhuang and boiled cakes were laid out on trestle tables. Boiled cakes are a sticky snack from Wenxi county in Shanxi.

By 9pm the red carpet was over and so was the opening ceremony. The big stars and the officials had all left the grounds. The people who earlier could not squeeze in by any means now dropped down off the wall and slipped through the side gates into the Platform hall to watch a film whose official ticket price was 588 yuan. Some jeered at those who had paid 70 yuan for fake tickets outside the gate; others shot back, "So you got a free ticket. Big deal."

This was the first public screening of Feng Xiaogang's Youth in China. It did not end until 12:05am. By then the temperature had fallen to 3 degrees Celsius, and people rubbed their hands as they left the Film Palace, arguing over which scene had crossed a line and cost the film its planned October release. A rumor went through the crowd from nowhere in particular: "Jia Zhangke even fell out with the higher-ups to get this film screened here." That afternoon Feng Xiaogang had said he would pick a release date before the year was out, but nothing was settled.

By October 30 the "festival" had properly begun. Fewer and fewer tourists blundered into the Film Palace; most of the people there now were film fans, tickets in hand, crowded around the ticket center.

The festival has an English name that nods to Ang Lee: the Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival, borrowing the title of the 2000 martial-arts film. Its Hidden Dragon section covers recent non-Western films from around the world, while the Crouching Tiger and New Generation sections showed work that has won prizes at Cannes, Busan, the Golden Horse and elsewhere. The nearly 500-seat Spring in a Small Town hall filled up again and again. Compared with the screenings Beijing and Shanghai hold all the time, Pingyao's film fans were, if anything, keener: they sat packed on the floor, and post-screening discussions often ran past an hour.

The Film Palace felt different inside, too. Notes on the Melville retrospective hung around the venue on vertical banners. Instead of the usual display of documents, the curators, from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, went to the trouble of hunting down an old television set and putting it in a 1970s room, where it played black-and-white clips from Melville's films on a loop.

Inside, a film fan could easily bump into the writer Liu Zhenyun or the director Xie Fei — men the young Jia Zhangke once looked up to from a distance.

7

Almost everyone running the Pingyao festival comes from Jia Zhangke's part of Shanxi. They are spread in a fine mesh through every corner of it, trading dialect now and then like a password.

In festival interviews, Jia Zhangke brought up "Shanxi" countless times. "Some things have to be done, or Shanxi will stay like this forever." And: "I just want to prove that we Shanxi people aren't incapable — we simply haven't had the chance."

Jia Zhangke owns seven companies, and staff from all of them crossed paths at the festival. Xstream Pictures helped with selection and with arranging venues and guests; Warm Current Films, which makes commercial pictures, lined up the festival's commercial resources; Ke Premiere, under Yishang Media, handled short-film production; the head of the Jia Zhangke Art Center chose and screened the films for "A Corner of Pingyao"; and the Mountains May Depart Family Kitchen branches in Jiajiazhuang and Taiyuan did the catering.

Every projectionist in every hall was a Pingyao local. The organizing committee had sent them to Shanghai for three months of training.

The plan is that after the festival the Film Palace will show Where Has Time Gone? free to audiences in Pingyao and Jinzhong. Out of season, the Pingyao Film Palace will put together other programs and stay on in the old town as an ordinary cinema. According to Wan Jiahuan, seats were about 93% filled during the festival.

Asked for figures on tourism and ticket revenue, members of the festival team said only that no official tally had been made. Pingyao Film Festival Co., Ltd. will not start operating on its own until its fourth year.

8

At the first press conference on opening day, the director Chloé Zhao was quietly answering reporters' questions. Ten minutes in, Jia Zhangke walked into the press center in sunglasses, a crowd around him. Every mind in the room wandered at once; several camera operators swung their lenses toward the side of the stage. He smiled out at the room without taking the sunglasses off. Earlier in the year he had told Xu Zhiyuan that cutting films had left him with light burns in his eyes, and that sunglasses helped protect them.

On the fifth day of the festival, Jia Zhangke laid on an official screening for the director Ma Liwen's A Test (《A 测试》), and brought in several celebrity endorsers for the sponsor, Momo, to put on a live show called "Pingyao Night" for the guests who had stayed.

Then he asked everyone into the banquet hall, where the Mountains May Depart Family Kitchen staff filled the vinegar saucers one by one and brought out Fenyang dishes. The traditional Chinese round table does not suit this kind of standing, circulating party; in a hall of about 100 square meters, everyone talked on their feet. As at a traditional Shanxi birthday banquet, Jia Zhangke and the festival team went from table to table proposing toasts, thanking everyone for coming and for their help.

Eating braised pork belly, holding a wine decanter, Jia Zhangke drank his way around the round tables one round after another, his sunglasses pushed up on top of his head.

The moon was nearly full, and coal fires were burning in the old town. The coal did not burn clean; black smoke shot up and settled over every corner of the Film Palace. Outside the gate, a long street of bright film posters ran off into the distance, and close by, someone had tipped out a wad of used tea leaves on the ground.

Follow the long street and you reach the Lower West Gate. Outside the old town, shantytown redevelopment was under way, rubble and lime scattered everywhere. The Pingyao government has put real effort into this. A red banner hung crooked on a low wall: "The whole city on one chessboard, one standard, demolition all the way through." When the project, reportedly costing 2.6 billion yuan, is finished, this will be a brand-new visitor center and parking lot.

Far out on the edge of town, more film-related construction is breaking ground. By next year Pingyao will have four film and television production bases.

(Cai Chunrong is a pseudonym, at the interviewee's request.)

Cover image from Reuters and a still from Platform; all other photographs, except where noted, were taken by the author.