'Art' needs more 'creative freedom'
- Source: Global Times
- [09:40 June 08 2010]
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By Shen Weihuang
Foreign and Chinese documentary filmmakers called on greater creative freedoms for their work Monday, bringing the issue of screening restrictions under the spotlight on the opening day of the European, American and Asian Documentary Forum in Shanghai.
Better known as the EAA, the two-day conference that got underway as part of the 16th Shanghai Television Festival, a five-day event celebrating television productions from around the world, industry insiders argued that limitations should not be imposed on their form of artistic expression.
"It's a form of art, and it differs from journalism or commercial films," said Grit Lemke, vice president of the International Leipzig Festival, an event that celebrates documentary and animated film in Germany. "Plus, directors don't tell audiences what to think; they just show them what happened and their audiences are left to come to their own conclusions."
According to Ying Qiming, director of the Shanghai Documentary Channel, freedom of expression in documentary filmmaking is the most crucial element.
"Unlike cinematic theater, documentary filmmaking is not intended for commercial purposes; it is rather a medium used to express the state of mind of an artist," he said. "Their efforts should therefore be respected."
Yet, as the Shanghai Television Festival readies to present audiences with 50 documentaries this week, some of which are politically sensitive, including the Last Train Home, which tells the story of the hardships faced by migrant workers in the country, forum participants acknowledged that the situation in China is improving.
Others admitted that censorship is not exclusively a "China problem" as previously highlighted by the controversy met with the 2004 release of American Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, picturing a critical look at former US President George W. Bush's role in the Iraq War.
More recently, this year's Academy Awards winner The Cove, a film exposing the tradi-tional practice of dolphin-hunting in Taiji, a small town in Japan, has stirred heated political debate.
Despite strong public outcry against the killings of the marine mammals worldwide and local protests aimed at stopping the release of the film in Japan, a group of some dozen theaters in the country have agreed to show the 90-minute documentary to Japanese audiences at the end of the month, according to Fujioka Asako, director of the Tokyo office of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.
A collaborative film producer of The Cove, American dolphin trainer turned activist Richard O'Barry said that he plans to stop short of nothing to see that "dolphin slaughtering in Japan stops soon."
"This will be the first chance for the Japanese public to see the powerful film," O'Barry told the Global Times via e-mail Monday. "But, the Japanese government, dolphin-killers, and big companies that thrive on dolphin exports are dead set against us."
According to a Shanghai-based filmmaker from Shandong Province, the clashing interests of social and political parties make for the biggest uphill battle in film producing.
"It's tough because sensitive issues can almost never be avoided when making docu-mentaries," he said.
Last year, filmmakers and the public nationwide joined a Chinese government-led campaign protesting against the screening of The 10 Conditions of Love during the Melbourne Film Festival.
The documentary directed by Australian Jeff Daniels is about Rebiya Kadeer, a former Xinjiang Uyghur businesswoman that Beijing considers a separatist and terrorist be-hind the July 5 riots in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, where nearly 200 people died.
