•Written by William T. Dowell• ••Sunday•, 05 •July• 2009 16:42•
BEIJING—Zhao Liang’s scorching film, “Petition,” was one of the most striking submissions at the 6th China Documentary Film Festival. Zhao’s two-hour documentary tells the story of Chinese petitioners, villagers who feel that they have suffered one injustice or another at the hands of provincial administrations and have come to Beijing to file a formal petition. Ignored by the bureaucracy in Beijing, they eek out a bare existence in makeshift shelters, and in one case, concealed in a hiding place under a bridge. Many previously squatted in Beijing’s squalid southern railway station before it was demolished to make way for the Olympics. Since provincial officials are evaluated partly on the basis of complaints against them, there is a common practice of engaging thugs, known as “retrievers” to intercept the villagers before they can reach the government offices in Beijing. Despite repeated beatings and rejections, the petitioners stubbornly refuse to abandon the official complaint process that gradually becomes the sole focal point of their lives. 
The film captures the lives of people who genuinely believed in the system as it was originally sold to them, only to find that the rules of the game were changing as China adapted to the practical realities of the modern world. The fact that it could be shown in Beijing all indicates a surprising openness on the part of the very authorities in Beijing who are being criticized. That may seem a bit inconsistent given the government's seeming obsession with censoring the internet, and the fact that YouTube, Wikipedia and PBS's Jim Lehrer Newshour are often blocked. But these days intellectuals who are actually in China seem to be increasingly able to say what they think, as long as they manage a delicate balancing act and do not openly challenge the basic idea of the system, or show signs of wanting to start their own political movement to compete with the authorities. The two scenes at the showing which triggered the most applause were one in which some petitioners, sitting by an outdoor campfire, denounce corruption in the Communist Party, and another in which a petitioner attacks Beijing intellectuals for being all talk and no action. Many of the people applauding were precisely those intellectuals. 
The China Documentary Festival is hosted by the Li Xianting Film Fund. Li Xianting, a former critic for China’s leading fine arts magazine, ranks as the unofficial spiritual godfather of much of the contemporary art movement in China, and the film archives gathered by the foundation that bares his name constitute a precious historical record of what has really been taking place in a country that has shown a tendency to continuously rewrite its own history under the influence of evolving political currents. A festival held by the foundation on university premises in central Beijing a year ago was briefly shut down by police after the first day, but then allowed to reopen in a less sensitive location. This year, authorities gave it a green light, as long as it was staged in the more remote art village, about an hour’s taxi ride from the center of town. Besides the intellectuals watching the film, a number of officials also support the program. Zhu Rikun, the festival’s program director, noted in a preface to the accompanying catalog, “In a dark era, still full of fear and threat, documentary films are no different from anything else.” But, in fact, the films show an enormous humanity on the part of just about everyone involved in Chinese life.
Huang Weikai’s “Disorder,” is a disturbing and occasionally hilarious account of five mundane situations developed in parallel to each other, and revealed in grainy black and white film. In one of the situation, a half-naked mad man wanders through congested traffic on a highway overpass while police try to determine if he has a family, while they also try to give him something to eat and convince him to put on some clothes. In another, a traffic accident involving a truck, unleashes a herd of pigs in the middle of traffic. The pigs are obviously delighted by their freedom while the police are less so, as they try to round them up and put them back in the truck. Finally, even that effort is checked when a police officer bawls out the truck driver for trying to put too many pigs into a cramped space that has insufficient ventilation. That is inhuman, he says. In the most disturbing sequence, a family discovers an abandoned infant in a basket in a field, but can’t decide what to do with her. They finally walk off and leave her to her fate (presumably the cameraman didn’t do the same). Still another film, Wang Yang’s “The Sound of Silence,” records the story of university graduates and dropouts over a seven-year period in which the difficulty of not being able to find a decent job raises questions about lost youth.
What all these films have in common is that they tell intensely human stories about people coping with every day life, in which dreams are tempered by fate and practicality. In short, China may be emerging super power, but its people are just human beings, and in that, they are no different from any of us.
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