The real world

• Source: Global Times
• [10:20 October 28 2010]
• Comments

Long and Jun struggle with addiction in Using. Photo: Courtesy of dGenerate Films

By Hao Ying

Director Zhou Hao's latest documentaries - on drug users, policemen, and a cadre accused of corruption - are showing at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art this weekend.

The 42-year-old director is most famous for the documentary Senior Year, about students preparing for university entrance exams, which gained mainstream popularity in China.

"It was shown on CCTV, Phoenix, Shanghai TV and Beijing TV," says Zhou. Despite the popularity of Senior Year, Zhou's documentaries, like other independent films, cannot be shown in normal Chinese cinemas. Commercial screenings are limited to film festivals, campuses and galleries.

His films are also passed around for private screenings. "Anywhere I have friends who would like to show my films, I'll give it to them to show an audience, because my films have no political purpose. I observe people, I don't judge them," he says.

Zhou will attend all three screenings this weekend, answering questions from the audience.

Using, screening Friday at 7:30, follows the relationship between Zhou and an urban Chinese couple struggling with heroin addiction. The film offers a glimpse of China's junkie subculture, but Zhou says that was not his purpose. Rather, as Zhou watches the couple's lives spiral out of control, he struggles with his responsibilities toward them.

"The name of the film is Using," he explains. "Our relationship is not like friends. It's something like using, it's hard to describe." The couple are now serving life terms in prison, he adds. This movie, unlike the other two, has no English subtitles.

Zhou says he had long wanted to shoot a documentary about policemen, and was granted permission to do so at a police station inside Guangzhou Railway Station. Cop Shop, screening Saturday at 6 pm, chronicles two weeks there. "It's the first time that policemen are real in a film," he says. "I never wear rose-colored glasses. I only focus on what their real life is like."

The Transition Period, screening Sunday at 6 pm, chronicles three months in the life of a country party secretary. A year after filming finished the official was suspended on suspicion of receiving more than 3 million yuan ($449,000) in bribes.

Talking to the Global Times, Zhou sidestepped questions about whether he had a sense the cadre might be corrupt.

"It is impossible to judge a person as good or bad," he says. "The officials in the whole country are like this."

Zhou worked as a journalist for the official Xinhua News Agency and the hard-hitting Southern Weekly before he started making documentaries.

"I wanted to do something myself," he says. "I am an independent director. 'Independent' means I need to express my own views."

Zhou sees a future for independent film in China. "The government has no time to take care of everything," he says. "We don't have a political purpose. We don't touch anything sensitive."

Yu Xi contributed to this story.