Workshop on Chinese Independent Documentary Film and Censorship

Display Schedule

Subject guarantor:

Helena BENDOVÁ

Name of lecturer(s):

Helena BENDOVÁ

Learning outcomes of the course unit:

The aim of the module is to introduce students to the methods and challenges of documentary film production in China today. We will also discuss the general mechanisms of censorship; which has many similarities to censorship in Czechoslovakia under the communist regime and other post-communist countries. Feedback will be given on student’s own analysis of a documentary film that they have seen, where censorship is still a question.

The students should understand how censorship mechanisms work, how to produce films in such an environment, what are the distribution platforms and strategies, and how essential the help of foreign film festivals are to distribution.

Mode of study:

module

Prerequisites and co-requisites:

Lecture with screenings and discussion. Module will take place at the FAMU's screening room and an additional screening will be held during One World Film Festival (http://oneworld.cz/).

Course contents:

The module will introduce the most important independent documentary films from the past 30 years while also explaining how Chinese censorship influences the work of many artists, filmmakers and writers who are forced to work outside the official system. The situation has grown especially difficult within the past 5 years since the new CCP Chairman and President, Xi Jinping rose to power in autumn of 2012. The purpose of this workshop is to scrutinize the effects of the conditions established in the state run Film Industry Law, effective from March 1st, 2017, on the film and curatorial work of a highly active member of the independent film-makers community and the supporters of independent film in China.

The workshop will be lead by Haruna Honcoop (5th year CAS FAMU student) who spent the winter semester 2017-2018 at Beijing Film Academy where she conducted research on recent Chinese independent documentary film. She is a graduate in Sinology from Charles University in Prague, spent 2 years as Chinese language student at Beijing Language University (2005-2006) and Taiwan University in Taipei (2007-2008), and is currently an MA student at FAMU. She has won the award for best experimental short documentary at This Human World Film Festival in Vienna in 2016 for her short, “True or False”; a documentary film about Sino-Czech postwar relations and is currently working on her new documentary film about the current state of Beijing's stadiums from the 2008 Olympics.

Chinese documentary filmmaker and ex-programmer of Beijing Independent Documentary Festival, Zhu Rikun, will be the workshop guest lecturer. He is one of the key figures of a complex network of independent documentary filmmakers in present-day China. His cinéma vérité style documentary films “Questioning” (2012), “The Dossier” (2014), “Dust” (2015), “Welcome” (2016) were screened and awarded internationally and his new documentary film “Anni” (2018) will have it’s world premiere at One World Film Festival in Prague.

Recommended or required reading:

(Available in the FAMU library)

- Daniel Biltereyst, Roel Vande Winkel (eds.), Silencing Cinema: Film Censorship around the World. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013

- Paul G. Pickowicz, Yingjin Zhang (eds.), Filming the Everyday: Independent Documentaries in Twenty-First-Century China, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016

- Zhang Zhen (ed.): The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007

- Matthew D. Johnson, Luke Vulpiani, Keith B. Wagner, Kiki Tianqi Yu (eds.): China's iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014

- Luke Robinson: Independent Chinese documentary: From the Studio to the Street. London and Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

- Haruna Honcoop, 2016. Nechodit naráz dvěma cestami: Rozhovor s dokumentaristou a filmovým kurátorem Ču Ž’-kchunem. (One cannot walk two paths at the same time – an interview with a documentary curator and filmmaker Zhu Rikun), Cinepur, no. 106, pp. 62-66. Available at http://cinepur.cz/article.php?article=3796

Assessment methods and criteria:

Attendance is mandatory at the workshop – student should sign the workshop attendance list and attend of one Chinese film screening during the One World Film Festival (student need to attach a ticket to paper analysis).

Write a 2 page analysis of a Chinese documentary film attended at One World Film Festival or seen during the lectures. Reading recommended: preliminary readings in preparation for the module.

The workshop is an outcome of “Chinese Documentary Film in the context of Censorship” SGS project, supported by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic in 2017. Workshop is also supported by Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation International Sinological Center at Charles University and One World Festival in Prague.

Course web page:

Note:

-

Schedule for winter semester 2017/2018:

The schedule has not yet been prepared

Schedule for summer semester 2017/2018:

Date	Day	Time	Tutor	Location	Notes	No. of paralel
09.03.2018		14:00–17:00		Projection Room Lažanský palác	Lecturer: Haruna Honcoop, Zhu Rikun	přednášková par. 1

The subject is a part of the following study plans: