AAIFF ’15: A Young Patriot

Zhao Changtong can relate the events of student protests in 1919, blow for blow, but he has no idea what happened during the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989. He is the perfect product of China’s educational system. The teenager is so wound up with nationalist fervor, he frequently parades through the streets of Pingyao chanting Maoist anthems, but his indoctrination will be profoundly tested by life after graduation. Du Haibin follows Zhao for five eventful years, charting his painful maturation in A Young Patriot (trailer here), which screens today as part of the 2015 Asian American International Film Festival in New York.

Hailing from a working class urban family, Zhao is the sort of student who is a prime target for the state’s unceasing propaganda campaign. When we first meet him through Du’s lens, he gives the Communist government credit for so conscientiously providing for him and his classmates. However, Du and editor Mary Stephens quickly cut to his parents, who explain all the economic sacrifices they made to pay for his school fees over the years. Reality is not what he thinks it is, as he learns when he is finally admitted to university and forced to take out considerable student loans in his own name.

While Zhao tries to maintain his patriotic zeal by volunteering for the campus propaganda association (they really do use the term “propaganda”), he cannot help noticing how greater opportunities are afforded to his better connected classmates. However, nothing will bring home the realities of China’s extreme social stratification like service as a volunteer teacher in the grindingly poor Sichuan mountainside. For a mere fifteen days, Zhao and his colleagues will provide Dialiangshan’s children the only education they will get until another such fifteen day excursion can be mounted.

Clearly, the Sichuan trip essentially completes Zhao’s intellectual and emotional divorce from the Communist worldview. To his credit, he also develops heretofore unseen empathy, maintaining a connection to the village after their brief term of service. Alas, contemporary China has one more curve ball to throw him, when the corrupt local authorities nationalize both the new house his parents are constructing and the longtime home of his grandparents for their latest dodgy development scheme.

In its way, Patriot is an epic film, but Du and Stephens (who deserves major award consideration) pare it down to a tightly compelling, keenly telling narrative. Clocking in under two hours, it is far more manageable than Hoop Dreams—and its stakes are far greater. Frankly, few documentaries force the audience to so fundamental revise their attitudes towards it subject. When we first meet the rather obnoxious young man, we instinctively tip him for someone due for a rude awakening, but we eventually feel for him quite deeply as he and his family face Job-like misfortunes.

Du has an extraordinarily shrewd eye for relevant little details, such as damning snippets of the historically inaccurate indoctrination that passes for instruction at Zhao’s university. Yet, that carefully constructed misinformation campaign turns to dust when Zhao and his fellow students looking into the neglected eyes of their Sichuan students. Shrewdly, Du also uses the concurrent rise and fall of “Red Revival” Party leader Bo Xilai to echo and punctuate Zhao’s bitter loss of faith.

This is a hugely important film on a macro level, but it is completely gripping on a micro level. Without question, it is Du’s best work to date, eclipsing the admirably brave and immersive 1428. Very highly recommended for anyone seeking an intimate understanding of China’s “Post-1990’s Generation,” A Young Patriot screens this afternoon (7/26) at the Village East, as part of this year’s AAIFF.

LAFF ’10: 1428

For China, the earthquake that devastated Sichuan province on May 12, 2008 has been like Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill combined. It has laid bare public corruption and put the local and national authorities on the defensive. Like Katrina, it has also been widely documented in films like the Oscar nominated short China’s Unnatural Disaster and Du Haibin’s feature 1428 (trailer here), the winner of the 66th Venice Film Festival’s Best Documentary Award, which screens this coming Sunday and Monday at the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival.

At 14:28 hours (2:28 pm) China was hit with what is considered the nineteenth worst earthquake in history just three months before the Beijing Olympics were scheduled to open. The Communist government’s official response has been controversial to say the least. Despite the quake’s severity, many suspect it would not have been as deadly had government construction been less shoddy, particularly at schools. Promises have been made to Sichuan survivors, usually by politicians orchestrating media ops, but the delivery of relief has been slow and problematic.

Du focuses his lens on the haunted faces of Sichuan’s dispossessed. They live in shanty towns and temporary housing, enduring shortages of food and power. Many would like to return home, but following a truly perverse plan of action, the government has begun demolishing houses that withstood the quake. Such is the efficiency of China’s emergency management. For many survivors, it appears all the authorities have to offer is an opportunity to wave at the Premier’s tour bus as his motorcade blows through town.

Stylistically compatible with China’s so-called D-Generation (D for Digital), Du eschews conventional documentary techniques, like formal interviews and voiceover narration. Instead, he lets the camera roll capturing the unfiltered reality of the quake’s aftermath at intervals of ten and two hundred ten days after the disaster. It is not pretty.

There is clearly a lot of anger in Sichuan that survivors do not seem to know how to express. One frustrated old man offers perhaps the most direct censure of the government, complaining: “The policies of the Communist Party are good in essence but they have been carried out wrongly.” In fact, the survivors seen in 1428 are much more guarded in their grievances than the grieving parents featured in Unnatural. Of course, it is worth bearing in mind Du’s footage was shot a mere nineteen years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, so he might well have been more circumspect in what he choose to include, for his subjects’ sake.

Like many of the D-Generation films, 1428 obliquely criticizes the Chinese Communist government from a perspective that would be considered left of center in the west. One elderly Taoist mystic (with much prompting) links the earthquake to the lack of observance of the Earth-God (perhaps implying a corresponding paucity of respect for the Earth by extension). However, the most heartbreaking footage of 1428 involves bereaved parents searching for the remains of their missing children amid the wreckage of their schools.

1428 is an eye-opening dose of reality, straight-up without any external editorializing. It is not the popular image of contemporary China the government has worked to cultivate. In truth, it does require some patience (though not as much as Du’s previous film Umbrella) because it so scrupulously represents life as it is for the Sichuan survivors. Highly illuminating, it is definitely recommended to anyone in the City of Angels when it screens at the LA Film Fest Sunday (6/20) and Monday (6/21).