While China is investing more resources and cultural capital into the film world, the alternative film movement is growing alongside the commercial and regime controlled film. The Electric Shadows of China section deepens and problematize the image of Chinese film.

Words: Jonas Holmberg, artistic director.

In 2018, China’s contribution to the world economy is expected to surpass America’s. Thanks to cheap labor, cheap capital and a large export market, China has had an explosive economic development in the last decades. There are cranes everywhere, there are ultramodern trains moving fast as lightning and hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been helped out of poverty. It’s true that China’s huge environmental problems have gotten worse and that social inequality has grown so wide that the communist country is said to be the world’s most unequal country, but while Trump’s America becomes more secluded, China is ruled by the increasingly powerful Xi Jinping, and they’re ready to take over as leaders of the world.

“So far China may not have been able to beat Hollywood when it comes to ‘flag-waving blockbusters’, but a parallel plan has also been put in place: to slowly change the color of Hollywood’s own flags. “

But you need more than financial power to lead the world. This show of strength is also about ”soft power” and cultural influence, and that means a popular film industry is vitally important. China has invested a huge amount of resources in order to develop an industry that can produce movies that are as internationally popular as Hollywood movies, but so far they haven’t quite succeeded. It’s true that Wu Jing’s nationalistic action movie Wolf Warrior 2 was seen by more people last year than any other movie ever made in China, but the rest of the world has been moderately interested in the geopolitically charged movie about a Chinese soldier fighting Western mercenaries in an African country plagued by war.

So far China may not have been able to beat Hollywood when it comes to ”flag-waving blockbusters”, but a parallel plan has also been put in place: to slowly change the color of Hollywood’s own flags. By investing heavily in big budget movies and Hollywood companies, China has started to gain a significant influence of the content in American blockbusters, and we’ve already seen how Chinese bad guys are being replaced by Chinese heroes. Clear examples are the wise Chinese president who prevents a world war in Arrival, the heroic Chinese spacemen who bring Matt Damon home in The Martian and China’s effort to build a modern Noah’s Ark in 2012. China’s rapidly growing cinema market is expected to surpass America’s this year, which only strengthens the trend. Now it’s the Chinese that are saving the world.

But far beyond this space race of world domination over movie stars, there is another kind of Chinese film that mirrors and explores one of the world’s most culturally complex countries. The swift and unpredictable social changes that China is experiencing creates a rich and nuanced film culture full of young filmmakers who explore new cinematic paths beyond the standardized commercial film culture. It’s these movies that we focus on in Göteborg Film Festival’s Electric Shadows of China.

In Chinese, you write ”film” with two characters that mean ”electric shadows” (dian-ying). It’s a wonderfully poetic description of the film process, but the title Electric Shadows of China can also be interpreted as a tribute to vibrant and sparkling Chinese films that take place in society’s shadier places. This includes films such as Li Xiaofeng’s Ash and Wang Feifei’s From Where We’ve Fallen, which use an urban pulse to problematize the materialistic culture of China’s newly rich middle class. And Huang Ji’s The Foolish Bird and Pengfei Song’s The Taste of Rice Flower, which describe the living conditions of the abandoned young people in the countryside, who are left under the care of old people when their parents move to the cities to work. Filmmakers like Huang Ji, Zhang Miaoyan (Silent Mist) and Vivian Qu (her Angels Wear White is competing in the International Competition) raise questions about a culture shaped by sexual violence.

During the festival, masters like Wang Bing and Xu Bing also present their new films. Wang Bing‘s existentially inquisitive documentaries about real life in China has made him renowned all over the world, and his intimate portrait film Mrs. Fang was awarded Best film in Locarno last summer. Xu Bing is one of China’s most internationally famous artists, and with Dragonfly Eyes he enters the world of cinema for the first time. It’s an experimental love story told with surveillance footage from a country that supervises it’s population more than most.

“Chinese cinema of today is an electrifying place that reflects and challenges a superpower”

Up until a few years ago, there was a relatively clear division in China between official films that are produced within the system (”tizhinei”) and independent films outside of the system (”tizhiwai”). The official films were sanctioned by the government and shown at cinemas, while the independent films were shown at film clubs and film festivals (they were called ”exhibitions” in order to avoid the censorships that are required for film festivals). This division was enhanced in the foreign view of Chinese cinema, since it corresponds to a classical Western narrative about film cultures in dictatorships, where there is a dichotomy between brave dissidents who make subversive films and devious puppets who make films that pamper to the system.

Working with Electric Shadows of China has made it obvious that reality is often not just black and white, and these filmmakers use different methods and strategies to navigate a specific system as best they can. The last few years, the situation has been complicated further by the fact that Chinese authorities have, on the one hand, hit hard against the independent film culture (the shutting down of Beijing International Film Festival 2014 is the most recognized example), and on the other hand, made it slightly easier for smaller film producers to get accepted by the system.

It’s quite apparent that it’s incredibly difficult to be a socially engaged or artistically challenging filmmaker in China today. But for us who are interested in Chinese film culture, it’s clear that Chinese cinema of today is an electrifying place that reflects and challenges a superpower that is currently going through political, economic and cultural changes that will have an impact on the entire world.