In the midst of a wider media crackdown, a Beijing film festival featuring a documentary on China’s ‘cancer villages’ and a film by artist-activist Ai Weiwei was raided and shut down by police last month.
Organisers of the Beijing Independent Film Festival had continued to promote it over the popular Chinese social media service Sina Weibo after police last month closed down a pre-festival workshop and detained students.
Among the films to be shown were Jie Wu’s “Hutoushan Village”, documenting one of China’s notorious ‘cancer villages’ in Yunnan province and a documentary produced by artist-activist Ai Weiwei delving into the controversial death of an anti-corruption campaigner in Zhejiang province.
But recently, late on a Friday evening on the tenth anniversary of the festival, police moved in on the Songzhuang hotel hosting the festival. They issued ‘contracts’ to the organisers, including festival director Wang Hongwei.
All screenings to more than two people would be banned and any attempt at underground screenings would see Wang detained and the entire district’s power cut.
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Earlier in the evening, the atmosphere had been bright. Liu Yaoqing, a bespeckeld young Guangzhou filmmaker dressed in white linen, proclaimed this was a celebration of China’s “independent spirit”.
Jenny Wu Man, whose film ‘Some Sort of Loneliness’ portrays a love triangle between three gay men, was excited that it would finally be seen outside of Beijing’s LGBT community.
In the month leading up the festival, police surrounded a hotel in Beijing’s rural suburb of Songzhuang, where young participants in a film workshop were staying.
They placed the group, which including a pregnant woman, under house arrest and cut them off from the film teachers before releasing them and forcing them to leave back to the city.
Police had last week issued a warning that any screenings of festival films would be banned, but with judges flown in from the US and Tokyo, organisers pushed ahead.
Following the raid, there were concessions from police. The organised talks were allowed to continue and participants would be allowed to collect DVDs of some of the films.
Once disbanded from the, workshop participants used social media messaging to regroup in the countryside, finishing the workshop with all but one of the original members.
One of the organisers said police threats didn’t worry him anymore. “You might not have seen but there were lots of black cars parked outside and all of them are plain-clothed police. We just wait for them to finish work.”
Wang Hongwei also seemed relaxed: “We got the feeling we’d be shut down this year.”
“In the future directors might just show films to each other in small groups rather than gathering lots of people”, he said. “It means less people get to see or partake in independent film making."
Earlier in the year, in March, the Yunnan Multicultural Visual Festival was also forced to cancel public screenings.
China is in the midst of a wider media crackdown including a campaign to “purify the internet”. In August “big V” micro-bloggers (the equivalent of twitter users with ticks) were called to a publicly broadcast forum urging them to be more positive online.
Last Friday, journalist Liu Hu, who accused an official of corruption on social media was arrested by police in Chongqing and brought to Beijing, accused of “fabricating rumours”. While Charles Xie, an outspoken Chinese-American investor with 12 million followers on Sina Weibo in China was arrested on the same day on alleged prostitution charges.
