Winter Vacation

According to recent social-commentary blockbuster The Social Network, China possesses more people of genius IQ than the entire US population. The same may hold true for genius movies, according to Karin Chien, founder and president of dGenerate Films, the leading distributor of independent Chinese cinema in the United States.

In Chien's estimation, just as China sits at the vanguard of much of the global economy, so too does it represent the cutting-edge of serious, thought-provoking motion pictures that deserve as wide an audience as possible.

Unmediated view

"That's basically the reason we started dGenerate - because we started noticing the independent films coming out of China and just said 'Wow!'" Chien told the Global Times during a recent interview. "My prerogative is just to find really groundbreaking, visionary cinema made in China by Chinese filmmakers."

Disorder
According to Chien, who worked for years as a producer of independent films unrelated to China before founding dGenerate in 2008, the films she encountered spoke to her in particular as an American of Chinese ancestry who possessed little China experience.

"It was also so difficult to find an unmediated view of China in the States," she said. "You'd have a movie like Mardi Gras: Made in China [a documentary about cultural and economic globalization, following the life-cycle of Mardi Gras beads from a factory in Fuzhou to a carnival in New Orleans] that, while interesting, imparted a very Western, reductive, not-so-complex view of what China is."

This disparity between the China presented to Western viewers and the reality on the ground compelled Chien to seek out a vision of China as represented by such intimate, probing portraits as Liu Jiayin's Oxhide and Cui Zi'en's Enter the Clowns, both films made on shoestring budgets, without distribution channels and wholly removed from the restrictive studio system - in essence, the definition of a Chinese independent film.

"We don't distribute studio films from China - that's a very clear part of the company mission," she said. "If there is any crossover between the studio system in China and the kind of films we distribute, I wouldn't know about it - I'm really not a part of that world."

Enter the Clowns
On the audience side, Chien said that any film emerging from another part of the world - especially one as foreign and exotic to Americans as China - immediately gets classified as niche entertainment, regardless of its actual scope or ambition.

"Even the biggest Chinese directors, like Zhang Yimou, get distributed by specialty arms of Hollywood studios," she emphasized.

Money talks

While it's no secret that Hollywood is looking to China with dollar signs in its eyes, eager to tap a gigantic market of potential film consumers, making fewer headlines is the voracious appetite among American viewers for quality Chinese cinema.

"We're very lucky in a sense, because there's a lot of interest from the States for all things China, hands down," Chien said. "Whenever I visit Beijing to source new material, I always get contacted by American film institutions or people in the film business, asking me to keep my eyes open for them."

Though Chien won't be filling IMAXes with any of her films, she outlined a few specific arenas in which the dGenerate library finds a flourishing clientele.

"For any movie, you basically have three avenues of distribution: theatrical, semi-theatrical and non-theatrical," she explained. "Theatrical is almost always a losing proposition, and now with DVD sales slipping, no one is making money from a standard release anymore."

The other two realms are where the lion's share of opportunity for dGenerate's catalogue lie, in more modest, community-based venues as cinematheques and museums, bars and lounges, and, particularly, in the surprisingly vast academic market.

Oxhide II.
"That's where most indie filmmakers - including American ones - make most of their money," she said. "By going directly to the gatekeepers - professors, deans, heads of academic departments - we can reach an impressively wide audience."

Aesthetic values

But despite this distributional slant toward a more scholastic milieu, Chien said that her first and foremost concern is finding films that will entertain, rather than purely educate or impart a social or political message.

"Our films coming from China are immediately positioned in a certain way, in a political context," she said. "But we're not looking for movies that can 'tell' you something about China - if you learn something from our movies, that's great, but our main concern is aesthetic value."

Chien cited the example of Huang Weikai's Disorder, an "absurdist" collage of life in modern Guangzhou that Chien insists not be viewed as some kind of tract or soapbox about Chinese society.

"What Wang filmed could really be seen in any city around the world, but because it happens in China, people immediately politicize it," she said. "Yet most of our filmmakers have absolutely no interest in that; they come from storytelling or visual arts backgrounds, and the camera is just another form of their paintbrush."