The China Independent Film Festival and Chinese Independent Film Festivals: Self-Legitimization and Institutionalization
Sabrina Qiong Yu and Lydia Dan Wu
If the term “Chinese independent film” is still largely confined to academic discourse, the concomitant term “Chinese independent film festival” has increasingly caught overseas media attention in recent years thanks to the authorities’ constant intervention in independent film festivals across the country. Since the emergence of the first Chinese independent film festival—Unrestricted New Image Festival in Beijing in 2001—independent film festivals have proliferated in China, including Yunnan Multicultural Cultural Festival (Yunfest), the China Independent Film Festival in Nanjing (CIFF), the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF) in Songzhuang (a suburb of Beijing), Chongqing Independent Film and Video Festival (CIFVF), Hangzhou Asian Film Festival (HAFF), Beijing Queer Film Festival (BJQFF), and China Women’s Film Festival (CWFF), also held in Beijing, to name a few. However, since 2011, the official clampdown on grassroots cultural events and public gatherings has impeded expansion of the network of Chinese independent film festivals.
S.Q. Yu (*) • L.D. Wu
University of Newcastle, Newcastle, UK © The Author(s) 2017
C. Berry, L. Robinson (eds.), Chinese Film Festivals, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55016-3_9
BIFF and CIFF suffered from venue relocation, suspensions, and fines, while CIFVF, Yunfest and HAFF were closed down indefinitely.
In his reports on independent film festivals in 2011, Shelly Kraicer writes, “it is striking to see how critically engaged cinematic discourse is with Chinese politics and culture at the present moment: when nervous, insecure officials feel the need to interfere; and where practitioners and analysts engage with anger and passion.”1 Indeed, if independent film festivals to a large extent fail to attract industry, media, or even audience, they have instead created a dynamic discursive space where filmmakers, curators, critics, and researchers engage freely in discussions not only on independent films and filmmaking but also on a wide range of cultural and political topics. Although the size of Chinese independent film festivals is usually small, they have gone far beyond traditional festival venues. They take place in cafes where festival organizers and participants gather and communicate, in online forums where post-festival discussion continues, and in festival or festival-stimulated publications where previously voiceless indie filmmakers can unflinchingly express their opinions.
However, due to well-reported state interference and the word “independent” in their names, critical attention has focused on the political side of these film festivals. Independent film festivals and their organizers are often constructed as the victims of an authoritarian government and as dogged “dissidents” who are fighting for freedom of expression in a highly restricted political environment. While this image is certainly justified, we would like to point out that apart from being discussed as a political event, Chinese independent film festivals should also be scrutinized as cultural institutions. According to Julian Stringer, the film festival “constitutes one of the key institutions” through which contemporary world cinema is circulated and understood. He proposes that one of the primary purposes of film festival studies is “to expose the organizational logic and workings of the film festival as an institution.”2 In this chapter, we seek to demonstrate that while lacking some stakeholders which are conventionally deemed key for the survival and success of a film festival, Chinese independent film festivals should still be seen as a cultural institution that has played an irreplaceable but under-valued role in film industry and culture in contemporary China. By establishing certain patterns and practices throughout their first decade, Chinese independent film festivals have constituted a to-be-institutionalized field. Despite the crisis and difficulties they face at present, and some incompatibilities between Chinese independent film festivals and the common perception of what constitutes a film festival, we suggest that Chinese independent film festivals have offered an alternative model of film festival, emerging from the particular political and cinematic context of twenty-first-century China.
We agree with Chris Berry’s 2009 assertion that independent events are “crucial to the artistic health of China’s film industry, which is otherwise hobbled by censorship and commercial oligopolies.”3 Indeed, as we will illustrate in the following pages, independent film festivals have proved to be an effective institution that facilitates the discovery of new film talents as well as fostering a healthy critical environment for contemporary Chinese cinema. This is especially important when considering the fact that their officially approved counterparts, Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) and Beijing International Film Festival (BJIFF), have not fulfilled these two functions in any noticeable way. We argue that Chinese independent film festivals have created an alternative public sphere in a restricted social environment, effectively sustaining the seemingly unsustainable independent film circle. We will use the CIFF to explore the organizational logic and workings of Chinese independent film festivals and how they enrich our understanding of film festivals as cultural institutions in a specific national context. Our research is based on five interviews we conducted between 2013 and 2015 with two key members of the CIFF organizing team, Cao Kai and Zhang Xianmin, and a careful reading of CIFF festival publications over the past 11 years.
