A 26-Year-Old Chinese Documentary Director's Road to the Oscars

In the end, he never made it to the stage.

At 9:30 p.m. Beijing time on January 15, the Academy announced the nominations for the 87th Oscars. The Chinese documentary director Mu Zijian and his short documentary Only Child were not on the list. The pity is that no Chinese director had ever got this far in the Oscars' documentary categories. But Mu may have seen it coming. In October 2014, when he learned his film had made the Oscar shortlist, he started worrying about promotion. He could not afford the basic PR and marketing budget a film needs: US$10,000.

Mu is from Beichuan, in Sichuan, and belongs to the Qiang ethnic minority. His debut film, Only Child, is about the disaster that struck his hometown in 2008. The documentary, 46 minutes and 41 seconds long, follows three families who lost their only children in the May 12 Wenchuan earthquake as they try to rebuild their lives.

Only Child was Mu's graduation project. He enrolled in New York University's journalism and documentary program in the summer of 2011, and he may be the only shortlisted contender with no production company behind him. He paid out of his own pocket to have the sound mixed, and spent several thousand dollars on 150 DVDs that met the Oscars' technical requirements for entries; the professional name for the format is Digital Cinema Package. Beyond that, his only expense was airfare to screenings at universities on America's East and West coasts, fitted in around his work. That may be the only promotion his film got.

When Mu arrived at NYU in the summer of 2011, he could barely use a camera. He had spent four years studying international trade at Sichuan University. At the end of June 2008, the State University of New York (SUNY) and the China Scholarship Council (CSC) set up a special exchange program called "China 150." SUNY offered full scholarships to 150 students from Sichuan universities directly affected by the earthquake, to study in the United States for a year. Mu beat 2,000 other applicants to become one of the 150. Two months later he flew across the Pacific to New York, a city he had only seen in films.

"That year was the first time I really came across the kind of thing I later made," Mu says. The documentaries he had seen in China were mostly about scenery. In New York that year he discovered what he calls "social-issue" documentaries.

At SUNY, as a sophomore, Mu was still studying economics. But he had always loved films, and in his spare time he often watched documentaries on HBO, the pay channel, on the school's televisions. He also found chances to see independent documentaries all over New York. "Schools are always holding free screenings, and afterward you can talk to the filmmakers. How great is that?"

The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake hit Mu more directly than most. His hometown, Beichuan, was one of the worst-hit areas. His family suffered heavy losses, and he lost his grandfather and a younger cousin. "Ninety percent of people in Beichuan lost an immediate family member in the earthquake," Mu told me.

He had always wanted to tell the story of the earthquake in his hometown. Now, in New York, more than 10,000 kilometers from Beichuan, he realized that documentary was the best way to tell it.

So he decided to study documentary in New York after finishing his undergraduate degree.

He chose New York for two reasons. First, documentary is a niche art form: China has almost no programs that teach it, and even in the United States the options are limited, with only a handful of schools, NYU among them, offering professional courses. Second, almost every independent documentary maker in the world is in New York. "New York is a very nourishing place," Mu says. "In a month here you can learn the industry from the bottom to the very top."

He got in.

Marcia Rock, who headed the program Mu applied to, had badly wanted to go to the quake zone in 2008 to shoot a documentary herself. She even wanted to take the whole program to China to film. Visa problems stopped them, and it remained one of Rock's regrets.

Two years later, Rock was delighted to read Mu's application, because he said plainly that he wanted to join the program to make a film about his hometown's recovery from the quake. "She backed my application and encouraged me from start to finish," Mu says. He had no experience in documentary, but coming from the quake zone gave him a rare advantage with this subject: he could fit in locally and get close to the people he filmed more easily.

In August 2011, at Mu's first class at NYU, the teacher said only a few words before sending him and a group of classmates out onto the street to interview people. This hands-on teaching took Mu from absolutely nothing to real skill within a year.

May 5, 2012, was the last day of the semester. The moment his last class ended, Mu dragged four suitcases straight to the airport. He flew to Hong Kong, changed planes for Chengdu, changed again for Mianyang, then took a bus home to Beichuan. He filmed for four months.

Mu Zijian filming Only Child in his hometown of Beichuan, summer 2012

The first month was full of uncertainty. Mu had not yet chosen his subjects or his theme. What he most wanted to film was the old county town in Guannei, the part of Beichuan "inside the pass," because he thought the countryside might hold better stories.

So he searched the old county town and much of Guannei for a theme and people to film. Often his family would first use their connections to introduce him, and he would then go and talk to people and dig for information. Sometimes he simply struck up conversations with strangers on the street: farmers from the village production teams, shopkeepers, truck drivers.

"It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Very hard. But once you get through it, you're through it," Mu says.

A month later he settled on his theme: shidu, the loss of an only child. Families who have lost their only descendant move people more easily, and give outsiders more to think about.

When Mu was shooting Only Child, the word shidu had not yet caught on. To some extent, the family planning policy created the shidu phenomenon. But as someone recording and telling a story, Mu made no comment on the policy in the film. He simply used the camera to show how three shidu families live.

"The more striking tension is that these people who have lost their only child don't think of themselves as special," he says.

A still from Only Child

His subject was, at heart, trauma, and as a survivor of the earthquake he often felt weighed down. Part of that weight came from the monotony of daily life. For a while Mu lived in the mountains with no internet and no electricity. He had almost no friends during the shoot, because he rarely met anyone his own age. "There are no young people in Beichuan, nobody my age at all." Beichuan is poor and hard to get to, and most young people have left to find work elsewhere.

"You're young, in the best years of your life, and you're alone in a place cut off from the world. It's really hard to bear."

Then he went back to New York. He did everything himself, from shooting to editing to the rest of post-production.

Mu did most of his editing in the winter of 2012, when the snow on New York's streets lay about half a foot deep. Every evening he bought food, got to school around eight, sat down at his computer and edited until seven the next morning. Then he walked 15 minutes through the snow, into the rising sun, back to his apartment in Greenwich Village and fell into bed. Around noon he got up and did it all again. This went on for about a month.

Mu says he worked through the night because editing needs long, unbroken stretches of time, unlike work that can be done in spare moments. The second reason: "I didn't want to go home in the dark. It felt too miserable, so I always stayed until dawn."

The score is the only part of Only Child Mu did not make himself. It was composed by Sela Alexander, an Israeli classmate at NYU. Sela had served in the Israeli air force, and when he learned that Mu's film was about the earthquake and parents who had lost their only children, he told Mu: "I was a soldier. I know death."

Mu Zijian's Only Child won the bronze medal for best documentary short at the 41st Student Academy Awards in 2014. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which presents the Oscars, accepts entries only if they meet certain conditions, such as winning an award at an Oscar-qualifying festival. The Student Academy Awards is one of those qualifying events. That award is what let Mu knock on the Oscars' door.

"Do you think you have a good chance?" I asked Mu.

"I don't think so."

"Why not?"

"No money."

He looked a little helpless as he said it.

Back in 2012, in the first episode of his talk show Xiaoshuo, Gao Xiaosong explained how the Oscar game works.

"The Oscars is not an art prize. It's an insiders' prize... I have a friend in Los Angeles who does this kind of work. That year their client was No Country for Old Men. They worked like mad, and No Country for Old Men ended up winning four awards." Explaining how studios promote films and lobby voters, Gao said: "You can't say the Oscars are completely fair, but you can't call them rigged either. There is a system that keeps them running. If a film is truly outstanding and wins everyone over, it should win. If the films are about equal, the system favors the people who understand the rules of the game."

"I understand the rules better and better now," Mu says. "If a film is going to compete for an Oscar, the production company sets aside part of its promotion budget for PR aimed at Oscar voters. Before the vote, PR firms use every method they can to build buzz: getting media to run reviews, holding screenings with fancy cocktail receptions, even buying advertisements. These firms have the details and contact information of every voter, and they do all they can to make sure the voters know the film and like it."

According to CNN figures from last year, studios spend as much as US$100 million a year on Oscar campaigns. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has strict rules limiting PR and lobbying, but the huge sums riding on the Oscars have made the people working behind the scenes for the little gold statue ever more powerful.

"The most important thing is to be seen," Mu says. The documentary categories have more than 200 voters. As the rules require, Mu mailed 150 DVDs to the Academy, which hands them out to voters; the voters watch them and then vote for the nominees. But not every voter receives his DVD, and those who do won't necessarily watch it. That is why PR firms hold screenings: to make sure the voters see the films.

But hiring these PR firms costs money. "More than ten thousand dollars," Mu told me. "Too expensive."

Of the other films shortlisted alongside Only Child, one was financed and produced by the US network HBO, and another was produced by PBS. Two Polish films had material support from Poland's national film school. Against these competitors, Mu's film had the smallest budget and the fewest resources.

The competition also included veterans like Lucy Walker, who has twice been nominated for an Oscar and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. "The voters are all her friends." However good a documentary is, if it cannot be promoted well and make a name among the voters, the road to the Oscars is extraordinarily hard, and so it was for Only Child.

The result was what he expected. His next step, Mu says, is to "keep filming."

He wants to go on telling the stories he cares about. He believes his education in both China and the United States gives him an edge in handling his subjects and helps him reach a wider audience.

Mu knows full well that independent documentaries don't make money. In China, apart from hits like A Bite of China, most documentaries go unnoticed by the public. It isn't only China. Even in the United States, documentary is a fairly niche form. The highest-grossing documentary in American history is still 2004's Fahrenheit 9/11, at US$120 million, and that would not even make the top 500 films at the US box office. Fahrenheit 9/11 is also an exception. "Generally, a documentary that takes US$1 million at the box office counts as a big production," Mu told me. According to Box Office Mojo, even Citizenfour, one of the most talked-about documentaries of 2014, grossed only US$1.5 million.

But Mu wants to keep making films. "You have to choose the thing you have the most passion for and believe in most. You have to tell the stories that truly move you," he said once more as the interview ended.

Parts of Only Child can be watched here, though in China you'll need a VPN to get past the firewall.