Doc Corner: China Comes Into Focus in Documentaries

by Glenn Dunks

Two weeks ago (I had to take a week off to help put on an award show!) when discussing Zhang Zanbo’s The Road, I mentioned the rise of documentaries not just by Chinese filmmakers, but about China in general. A fascinating convergence in the rise of China as a global and controversial super-power with the rise of documentary filmmaking as a populist artform. It seems appropriate then to look at a recent trio of documentaries that focus on China and that each tackle a compelling and important subject: women’s sexual rights, animal poaching, and the destruction of the Earth...

The first is Hooligan Sparrow, a powerful cinema debut from filmmaker Wang Nanfu and a work of determined bravery on behalf of Wang and her collaborators – the highest profile of whom is the one who gives the film its name. Ye Haiyan aka Hooligan Sparrow is a dedicated activist whose efforts to bring attention to the exploitation of women among China has made her not just an authoritarian target and a famous spokesperson, but even the focal point of one of Chinese artist provocateur Ai Weiwei’s most symbolic and moving works of installation art, “Ya Haiwan’s Belongings” (2013) which exhibited in, among elsewhere, Brooklyn in 2014.

The film is, at least initially, about a case involving the prostitution and rape of a group of young female students who were sold for sex by their school principal, before organically evolving into a startling chronicle of the nation’s police state and the way its rebellious dissenters are hunted with even fiercer determination than the perpetrators of horrific crimes.

It’s a scrappy film, one made with significant use of hidden cameras, without title cards (lest they offer too many clues to the participants’ whereabouts) and told through Wang’s narration that echoes with naïve wonder as she discovers the enormity of her story as she records it.

Even without the immediate urgency of the central storyline, a film capturing vision of Ye in action would be a fascinating one. Allowing audiences into the minor details about her life without turning into a full-blown Wikipedia-style documentary about her was a smart choice by Wang; her film leaves a lot unspoken about Ye’s past, instead preferring to focus on her present. The protest that kicks off Hooligan Sparrow’s action (so to speak) is a wonder to see on film, a part of modern Chinese life that is never seen. And consider the extraordinary sequence in which the director realizes her camera has been spotted and is subsequently hounded and harassed by plain-clothed police who proceed to intimidate and berate her. The guerrilla tactics lend the film a gravitas that mere biographical portrait would miss. If the film takes the name of just one of its radicals, it's really about all of the bubbling of political activism hidden from sight in China.

The same cannot be said, however, for The Ivory Game, a new documentary streaming on Netflix that also uses hidden cameras to uncover crimes that are rarely spoken about in China. Where Wang’s film found its subjects in moments of rage and also dignity when faced with great danger amid moments of solitude, The Ivory Game directors Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani oversell their material as its subjects fight evil poachers in Africa and illegal traders in China. The recurring concept of the documentary that is “just like a Hollywood thriller” is very much at play here with early sequences hinting at a slickly bombastic style similar to last year’s frustrating Cartel Land (and I say that knowing many thought Cartel Land was excellent - I did not).

The Ivory Game never really settles down until its end when the sobering facts of elephant poaching are imposed across painterly images of rescued ivory being torched. I certainly learned stuff from the film and it’s entertaining in the way that many Hollywood thrillers are well put together enough as an acceptable way to spend two hours on a long-haul flight, and there are individual moments that definitely hold potential, but The Ivory Game all too often focuses on the most obvious elements. This may appeal to the broader audiences of Netflix, but as a film it is in a curious position of being more or less derailed by a slavish devotion to a cinematic format that it is not suited to.

The best of the lot, however – and sadly the only one of the three not on the Oscar documentary long-list, not that it would stand a chance of a nomination anyhow – is Zhao Liang’s Behemoth. A film as towering as its name suggests in demonstrating the destructive erosion of China’s landscape that is being continuously plundered, torn into by bulldozers and loaders. Cities of skyscraper apartment complexes with nobody there to live in them among roads and highways with nobody to drive on them.

Zhao lends his film a somewhat experimental tone, offering poetry in the place of traditional narration alongside manipulated imagery as he places bodies across the dying Earth of China. When his camera isn’t focusing on the dirt and charcoal-covered faces of the miners, it is observing from above and below the procession of trucks that file in and out of the mines like worker ants. And in multiple awe-inspiring takes his camera pans from the blue skies and green grass occupied by goat herders to the bleak and brown canvas of the mining fields. In another strange sequence, local workers are shown earning what must be a pittance by shovelling dirt into their buggy-like automobiles – they look like something concocted out of Mad Max: Fury Road – unwilling participants in the destruction of their way of life.

Like the other two films, much of Behemoth was filmed secretly, cameras and naked bodies placed on the edge of mines that shudder and shake with the destructive force of diggers and explosives. And yet its images are of a startling crystal clear quality that are a wonder to hold. It’s a film that offers a unique and singular take on one of the planet’s most pressing issues and presents it in a way that makes for one of the most eye-popping and best looking films of the year as well as one of the best.