Young documentary makers get a boost
By Li Anlan |
June 14, 2013, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
FENG Yan spent 18 years documenting the sweeping changes in the lives of four women uprooted by the monumental Three Gorges Dam project.
Now she hopes to put that footage together to tell a story and make a film "Daughters of the River." She needs financial aid. So far, she has footage, an outline, a proposed budget and a team.
She showed film clips and made a pitch on Wednesday at the 2013 Magnolia Documentary Awards (MIDA) young filmmaker project. It is a competition to make five films, each coming with funding and support for aspiring documentary makers.
She is one of the five winners of the 2013 MIDA Filmmaker announced last night. The other four winners are: Xiang Wang ("Stories of Alxa People and Camels"), Zhang Zanbo ("The Road"), Sun Yueling ("Stories about Jiuqian") and Ji Dan ("The Three Generations of Women Living in the Mountains").
Feng follows four women with different backgrounds, living in different towns and provinces along the Yangtze River from 1994 to 2012. They were among the 1.13 million people who were resettled to make way for Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydropower project.
"You can't paraphrase what you feel after actually living with them," Feng said. "It's a very complicated feeling of knowing what they had to go through."
Through tracking the life of the four women, Feng documents changes in all aspects of their lives, including their dreams, their struggles, their livelihoods, their attitudes toward life and love.
The MIDA Filmmaker Plan encourages Chinese documentary filmmakers. It was launched 2006 by Shanghai Media Group as a long-term project.
Now in its fifth year, it has received 361 proposals for this year.
The theme this year is "The Power of Time." To enter the preliminary selection, applicants submit an outline of their proposed documentary, a production budget, resume of the film team. There is no limited on subject.
Fifteen projects were chosen to be made - Feng's is one of them - and their directors attended master classes at the current Shanghai TV Festival. They were given by noted documentary directors Wang Ren from China, Yves Jeanneau from France and Kim Min-chul from South Korea.
The jury panel includes filmmakers Liu Jingqi and Wang Ren, director Peng Xiaolian, producer and painter Yan Zheng'an and writer Sun Ganlu.
After Feng's brief presentation about "Daughters of the River," Peng discussed issues directors should consider in making films telling the stories of people who are poor and struggling. "It raises the question of dignity, and the respect for people at the bottom of society," she said.
Another issue is the frequently inevitable contradiction between what the documentary maker thinks should be filmed and what the general audience wants to patch. Directors and producers consider their social and cultural responsibilities, while some viewers are looking for something pleasant and beautiful to watch, or a dramatic story, she said.
In this documentary program, young independent filmmakers select issues that reflect on society from different perspectives and typically tell stories based on one or more characters. The stories might be painful, but they are rooted in reality, and the MIDA Filmmaker Plan helps guide and finance the projects.
Some projects vying for funding this year are stories about ordinary people.
For example, "Stories about Jiuqian" (Jiuqian is a volunteer group in Shanghai catering to help children of migrant workers) is about a group of children leaving the countryside with their migrant worker parents and moving to cities. The children sing in a choir and eventually take different paths in life.
Good documentary makers need to know how to tell a story, find the characters to tell it and learn how to ask questions, Peng observes.
"You have to do your homework and learn about the personality of the people, then you ask them questions, pretending you don't know the answer," Peng says. "Coming up with the right questions is the most important."
Now she hopes to put that footage together to tell a story and make a film "Daughters of the River." She needs financial aid. So far, she has footage, an outline, a proposed budget and a team.
She showed film clips and made a pitch on Wednesday at the 2013 Magnolia Documentary Awards (MIDA) young filmmaker project. It is a competition to make five films, each coming with funding and support for aspiring documentary makers.
She is one of the five winners of the 2013 MIDA Filmmaker announced last night. The other four winners are: Xiang Wang ("Stories of Alxa People and Camels"), Zhang Zanbo ("The Road"), Sun Yueling ("Stories about Jiuqian") and Ji Dan ("The Three Generations of Women Living in the Mountains").
Feng follows four women with different backgrounds, living in different towns and provinces along the Yangtze River from 1994 to 2012. They were among the 1.13 million people who were resettled to make way for Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest hydropower project.
"You can't paraphrase what you feel after actually living with them," Feng said. "It's a very complicated feeling of knowing what they had to go through."
Through tracking the life of the four women, Feng documents changes in all aspects of their lives, including their dreams, their struggles, their livelihoods, their attitudes toward life and love.
The MIDA Filmmaker Plan encourages Chinese documentary filmmakers. It was launched 2006 by Shanghai Media Group as a long-term project.
Now in its fifth year, it has received 361 proposals for this year.
The theme this year is "The Power of Time." To enter the preliminary selection, applicants submit an outline of their proposed documentary, a production budget, resume of the film team. There is no limited on subject.
Fifteen projects were chosen to be made - Feng's is one of them - and their directors attended master classes at the current Shanghai TV Festival. They were given by noted documentary directors Wang Ren from China, Yves Jeanneau from France and Kim Min-chul from South Korea.
The jury panel includes filmmakers Liu Jingqi and Wang Ren, director Peng Xiaolian, producer and painter Yan Zheng'an and writer Sun Ganlu.
After Feng's brief presentation about "Daughters of the River," Peng discussed issues directors should consider in making films telling the stories of people who are poor and struggling. "It raises the question of dignity, and the respect for people at the bottom of society," she said.
Another issue is the frequently inevitable contradiction between what the documentary maker thinks should be filmed and what the general audience wants to patch. Directors and producers consider their social and cultural responsibilities, while some viewers are looking for something pleasant and beautiful to watch, or a dramatic story, she said.
In this documentary program, young independent filmmakers select issues that reflect on society from different perspectives and typically tell stories based on one or more characters. The stories might be painful, but they are rooted in reality, and the MIDA Filmmaker Plan helps guide and finance the projects.
Some projects vying for funding this year are stories about ordinary people.
For example, "Stories about Jiuqian" (Jiuqian is a volunteer group in Shanghai catering to help children of migrant workers) is about a group of children leaving the countryside with their migrant worker parents and moving to cities. The children sing in a choir and eventually take different paths in life.
Good documentary makers need to know how to tell a story, find the characters to tell it and learn how to ask questions, Peng observes.
"You have to do your homework and learn about the personality of the people, then you ask them questions, pretending you don't know the answer," Peng says. "Coming up with the right questions is the most important."
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