Made in China

“Go out and make a film guys.” That’s what I imagine the director general of Inner Mongolia Television Station says to his employees. Chagede’er or Charlie as I call him, is one of the director general’s employees who is a filmmaker from the Province of Inner Mongolia, West China’s most northerly province. I was there training Charlie and other director’s and picture editors the technique of making good documentaries and their opportunity to just make films leave me green with envy. Charlie and his team have a free reign - to make documentaries. They have cameras available, crews and tape stock - to make films. All they lack is the skill to structure their good stories, a deficiency the training project is tackling. Anyway – the best way to learn – is to go out and make films. This free reign is a different view of press censorship that the western media paint of China. Charlie is making a film on The Grasslands and it is about one man’s fight to save land entrusted to him by his ancestors which is been destroyed by an environment unfriendly Paper Mill. The man takes the Paper Mill all the way to the Supreme Court in Beijing and wins. But he only wins a small payout which doesn’t’ come near to touching the long term environmental damage that the mill’s effluents have devastated. Nonetheless Charlie was there, he even took two cameras into the court room and filmed the whole trial. Charlie's audience will find out about the long term effects too when they see his film.

All in all I worked with 29 filmmakers from six of the West Provinces of the People’s Republic of China. The key to turn their filmmaking skills into great films is initial research and formulating a clear structure. I discussed this issue with Charlie in class. When I mentioned researching a subject and designing its basic structure before you even pick up a camera he shrugged his shoulders and laughed me off. “That’s feature film” he told me. “For documentary one should only observe.” The Inner Mongolian’s are stuck in one genre of documentary film, and that’s observational. To them the documentary film is all about observing and then editing those observations together in a linear way. They don’t know investigative journalism for instance. The Syrian’s might call this self censorship and I am sure the Chinese Government have nothing to worry about controversial films coming out of the hat.

Although the indigenous films viewed in the seminar and workshops stopped short of criticising or questioning the authorities, the filmmakers always conveyed the hardship, difficulties or inequalities of the under represented. Bringing their issues into public domain. Overall, this was an outstanding opportunity to install valuable filmmaking techniques in a very prominent layer of civil society: social documentary filmmakers. For it is they who are the eyes, ears and voices of ordinary people. And that’s another reason why I am green with envy, in the west we spend too much time glamorising the already famous. It’s ordinary people that the greatest documentaries are made about.