WU Wenguang, one of the founding figures in Chinese independent documentary, brings three young filmmakers from China to present their collective work, “the Memory Project.” The project is based at Coachangdi Workstation in Beijing. From there, young filmmakers fanned out to return to family villages and their own pasts, real and imagined, to inquire about The Great Famine of 1959-61 — a disaster of whose memories have been actively abandoned by the state. Aiming to create a “folk memory archive,” the project, which combines documentary films, oral history records, and live performances, presents an alternative narrative of Chinese history than the one written in official textbooks. As these young filmmakers search for the distant memory from an old generation that is still living in rural poverty, their encounter with the past reveals as much about the wish for memory as of memory itself and of the interesting role of film in such projects of retrieval..
THE FILMS:
Self-Portrait and Three Women (2010, 70min)
Directed by Zhang Mengqi.
The filmmaker’s statement:
This year I turned 23, the age when women become pregnant with dreams. Yet, even while nursing our own dreams, we must carry the burden of two other women’s dreams as well. This film begins with my own search, then delving into my mother and her mother, where blood has flowed through three generations, in these women who grew up in different times. As a victim of an oppressive marriage, my grandmother held hopes for my mother to
have a happy marriage. When my mother became a victim herself, she turned those hopes to me. Marriage may be every girl’s dream, but it is also the murderer of those dreams.
Self-Portrait: At 47 KM (2011, 77min)
Directed by Zhang Mengqi.
The filmmaker’s statement:
After my first documentary Self-portrait and Three Women, my second “self-portrait” was painted in a village named “47 KM.” This village is located 47 KM from Suizhou, Hubei Province, where my father was born. He left the village when he was 20, but his father, my grandfather, still lives there. In the summer and winter of 2010, through my participation in the “Folk Memory Project”, I went back to the village, which seems disconnected from my current life, and re-discovered and came to better understand my grandfather, the old villagers who underwent the disaster of the famine fifty years ago, as well as the village, which always perplexed and embarrassed me. What does “47 KM” really mean to me? It seems to be a mirror, I see myself in front of it.
THE FILMMAKERS:
Zhang Mengqi was born in 1987. She graduated from the Dance Academy at the Minzu University of China in 2008. Since 2009, she has been a resident artist at CCD Workstation. Her four documentary films, Self-portrait with Three Women (2010), Self-Portrait: At 47 KM (2011), Self-portrait: Dancing at 47 KM (2012), and Self-Portrait: Dreaming at 47 KM (2013), complete her “self-portrait series”