Guest blog by Henrik Møller, Associated Student at NIAS, who visited the film festival ‘Focus Asia – Young in Asia’ which took place in Lund 22-23 November 2006 

Focus Asia – Young in Asia
Chased by grim weather moving towards Copenhagen from Western Jutland, a small delegation of four Asia interested people, including NIAS project coordinator Martin Bech and myself, escaped over Øresund and headed towards a clear, blue sky over Lund. The occasion was the Focus Asia Documentary Film Festival that showcased ten films which, according to the program, would “reflect the different challenges, choices and dreams of young people in Asia”. Tied together by this theme, the Film Festival was also to expose cultural and social differences in the region, and the locations of the films included rural and urban settings in North Korea, Japan and China, as well as Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and India. The Film Festival was hosted by the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University, who kindly provided free tickets to the two-day Film Festival. The following is this blogger’s subjective review of the first five films that were showcased on the first day:

Disaster tourists with a social conscience
The first film was The Tsunami Generation, directed by Folke Rydén (2005). It told the story of a few young people, who survived the Tsunami disaster in the Aceh province of Sumatra in 2004, where 200 000 people died and half a million were left homeless. We saw how these young people who had all lost familymembers and their homes in the disaster were trying to regain a life, home and hope in the uncertain, chaotic aftermath of the Tsunami.

Interspersed with the personal stories of the young people we got an image of the new complex situation in Aceh, where different parties with different interests all played an active role in the rebuilding of the province: A group of Acehnese pro-independence leaders based in a Stockholm suburn were busily in contact with GAM guerillas in the mountains above Banda Aceh and the Indonesian government in order to make a peace agreement, which would stop violence, disarm guerillas and give more control over natural resources to the Achenese. Radical religious Indonesian Islamist groups were trying to recruit members from the disaster struck population, and foreign NGO workers, who were portrayed with a good share of ridicule as western disaster tourists with a social conscience echoing the same development discourse, wanted to help the locals, but did not know how to manage the massive chaos and the different ways of doing things in the local context. A middle aged local man, who provided jobs and a shelter for three brothers who lost their father stood out as the one, who was perhaps doing the best job in getting at least some of the young people back on some kind of track towards a livable life.

The movie gave a good impression of the complicated situation in Aceh after the Tsunami, and the characters were portrayed in a sober way: As victims of a terrible disaster, who, however, were also agents of their own destiny, and who with some help will hopefully manage to build up a good new life in a new Aceh.

Not really revealing the challenges, choices and dreams of the next generation
Vietnam: The Next Generation by Sandy Northrop (2003) could have been exchanged with a walk in Lund’s cosy suncovered streets for two reasons. First, approximately halfway through the movie, the screen started to ‘freeze’ for some time only to ‘jump’ five seconds, then ‘freeze’ again, and so on, much in the way a cheap copied Chinese DVD will do it, leaving the viewer completely frustrated. Second, I simply didn’t find the film good, and was not all that disappointed, when it finally proved impossible to play it, and we stopped 2/3 into the film.

It had the aim of “revealing the challenges, choices and dreams” of the post-war Vietnamese generation, who are now “seazing opportunities unimaginable in their parents time” (cited from the programme), and depicted the lives of seven young Vietnamese in order to do that. This was the problem of the film. Because how to depict the choices and dreams of an entire generation through seven persons? I found that purpose far too ambitious and, as it was presented in the beginning with a catchy graphic intro, perhaps also pretentious.

VIETNAM: The Next Generation wanted too much, but was not able to deliver. All the the persons depicted were interesting characters for a documentary, but we never really got close to any of them – neither the success stories nor the tragic destinies. Also, I was not convinced about what they had in common – except being from the same generation. In my opinion there is too large a difference between a male Vietnamese-American MBA graduate doing business in Hanoi and a single-mother landmine victim farming ricefields in the countryside to present them as having anything in common, except that they are residing in the same country. Naturally, those are the social, cultural and economic differences which exist inside many rapidly developing countries in Asia, which is also an important point to make, but then we need to know something about the reasons and consequences of those differences. In my view, the film skated too lightly over its persons and the different themes and problems connected with their lives and would probably have benefitted from a more thorough focus on two or three persons.

A changing view on a changing place
What VIETNAM: The Next Generation didn’t achieve, FLYOVERDELHI by Paolo Favero and Angelo Fontana (2004) did. It aims at offering “a series of snapshots on the life of young middle-class men and women in globalizing New Delhi” (cited from the programme), and adresses a range of issues of importance to this emerging class, as well as to the audience trying to understand their lives, such as tradition vs. modernity, consumption, national pride, love and marriage.

The director Paolo Favero was present, and his introduction to the film and the subsequent discussion definitely had a positive effect on my impression of it. The film is based on Favero’s long-term anthropological fieldwork in Delhi. Introductory, he presented the purpose of the film as an attempt to spark a discussion of representation. He had therefore consequently left out the pictures of the dirty and poor streetside scenes, which, he said, are often the way filmmakers portray India. In fact, I had a hard time recognizing Delhi from when I was there as an after-high school backpacker, but that’s why the film was successful; because it managed to portray a Delhi and India, which most Western backbackers (in India and most other ‘exotic’ countries, probably) definitely don’t want to see. But it’s there and therefore relevant. As Westeners search for ‘traditional India’ - religion, spirituality, the country’s beauty in spite of it’s poverty and so on - these middle-class young people incorporate in their fastpaced lifestyles ‘Western’ ideals and practices such as consumption, entertainment, free love, less moral constraints at the same time as they cherish national pride of “whatever it is” that make up their cultural roots.

Viewed as “a series of snapshots”, the film gave a good impression of the hectic lifestyles and mixed concerns of the middle class people it depicts, because those snapshops are well-chosen, and because there is also left spaces for ‘breaks’ in the rythm, where the informants explain their views and concerns, and where academics analyzes the contemporary Delhi youth culture and identity. The form and content of the film therefore interact to form a coherent story in the sense that the mixed cultural influences of the middle class, their changing concerns, inspiration and impulsive jokes, acts and ideas, is reflected in the tempo, rhytm and filmic travel of the images as they change, move and break. FLYOVERDELHI gives exactly that; a changing overview on a changing place, at the same time as it introduces us to a certain social group who manage their lives in the midst of those changes.

It has to hurt
Cheered up by the funny scenes and fast pace of FLYOVERDELHI, we placed ourselves deep in the seats for the Chinese film To Live is Better than to Die by Weijin Chen (2003). We were to remain there in silence for 59 minutes, and to leave the cinema and head towards the trainstation and rainy Copenhagen in silence. This is a hard film, very good, but hard.

The film is from Wenlou in China’s Henan province, where more than 30% of the villagers got infected with HIV, when they sold their blood in the early 90’s. Weijin Chen stayed in the village for months and zoomed in on a small family, as they experience the terrible consequences of the disease.

The audience is confronted with the tragedy of the family through pictures that are so moving that it is impossible not to be affected by their pain. Sometimes I was thinking that the director is maybe going too close: When the mother lies halfway unconscious on a cart in the family’s small courtyard unable to speak or eat because the disease is already affecting her brain, and the camera films her face, the eyes, the spit in her mouth, the flies on her face. The smallest boy, who sits around naked from the waist down on the dirt floor and his own diorrhea, and his oldest sister (the only one in the family not infected) who is perhaps 7-8 years old and has to take care of her brother - carefully trying to get infected. The father, who does not know when his two youngest children will die, and what will happen to his oldest daugther, when he dies himself.

In retrospect, I think the filming is appropriate. It focuses so close on the faces of this slowly dying family that it hurts the audience. And it has to hurt. Their pain is so much worse and their story is so tragic that it seemed irrelevant to talk about the film, when it finished. People left the cinema silent. There was not much to discuss. This film was simply portraying a family’s tragedy, and if its purpose is to create awareness and empathy, I think it succeeded. Off course it should also promote a discussion of how it could happen that people got HIV from selling their blood, what China is doing to prevent the spread of the disease and how its victims are, and should be treated. But leaving the cinema with the fresh, strong impression of its images in the mind, no one was up for that discussion.

Wal-Mart suing Teddy Bear
We left Lund before the last movie, which we had already seen during the CPH:DOX Film Festival some days before, where the director Micha X. Peled had were present and led a good discussion about the film. To be sure, the film was certainly worth a second view, but To Live is Better than to Die did not leave us eager to go once again into the misery of the less fortunate people of modern China. China Blue (2005) is a very good film, which portrays the backside of globalization and China’s “economic miracle” through the lives of young female migrant workers, called dagongmei, who work in a jeans factory in Guangdong province.

We follow a young girl, Jasmine, on her trip from the village in Sichuan to the factory in Guangdong province, where she is hired to cut and check stiches on blue jeans for a salary at around 0,5 RMB pr. hour (around 0,4 DKK). The boss is portrayed as an overall unsympathetic new rich entrepeneur, who lands huge orders on cheap jeans from foreign importers, and makes the employees work 7 days a week, sometimes up to 17 hours pr. day without overtime pay. Often, salaries are withhold and the workers receive fines if they, for instance, dare to sneak out of the factory at night to have a view of the new city they are living in.

However, this is not only a story of the dagongmei as victims. It also shows their humor, resistance, love and dreams. This view of the dagongmei gives them a human face. They are exploited workers in a system, whose economy is largely built upon their cheap labor, surely, but they are also humans with resources and agency.

China Blue is the second part of a trilogy on globalization. The first one, Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town takes a critical look on US supermarket chain Wal-Mart, which also receives an ironic comment in China Blue. When Peled efter the film was asked by a guy in the audience why his film production company is called Teddy Bear Films, he revealed a great critical irony, which made me want to watch that movie: “Can you imagine a headline in the New York Times saying ‘Wal-Mart suing Teddy Bear’”?

Unfortunately, none of us had the time to attend the second day of the filmfestival, which hosted four films. Judging from the programme they also had the potential of making the cinemaaudience leave in silence, but hopefully also a little bit wiser on the conditions of many young people in Asia, who are inextricably caught up in the effects of globalization.

To round up this long entry, I’ll just thank the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University for letting us watch these very different films. Maybe NIAS will be able to help hosting similar events in the future? Finally, thanks for reading, and if you have the chance, go and watch some of these films!

References:

Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University http://www.ace.lu.se/o.o.i.s/6038

Micha X. Peled’s Film Production Company http://www.teddybearfilms.com/