A Random Update: The World Mountain Documentary Festival, a Film Festival without films+The promise of more to come

Ya, So it's been a super long time since I've made it back to the bloglines. A lot has happened, especially as it concerns the contemporary arts of China... and the world for that matter, now helplessly mired in an economic mud bath that is sure to eliminate art from most people's shopping lists and god willing send art's focus from the market back towards its own elusive core ...
Anyway. Before the shit hit the fan I went to Qinghai for a film festival or so it seemed...
(*This is also posted on DART soon... like tomorrow)

Qinghai is located between Gansu Province and the Tibetan Autonomous Zone in the mid-west of China. It is home to several minorities including, at over 20% of the population, Tibetans. It is an area that sits at an average elevation of 3000 meters above sea level. It is a place, one might argue, that is very close to heaven, a spiritual place indeed. So spiritual in fact that even the film festivals there don’t show films.

In late September myself, along with a group of 25 filmmakers and enthusiasts from Beijing were invited to Xining, Qinghai’s capital for the Sanjiangyuan International Photography Festival and the World Mountain Documentary Festival. It was a four day event chock full of sight seeing, feasting, singing, ceremonies… but oddly, no films. The Xining city government, who organized and sponsored the event, generously hosted a total of 1000 plus visitors from as far away as Brazil, Australia and the United States. Films or no films, we were treated to an entertaining time, yet throughout remained slightly perplexed by the context of it all. Pitching the affair as a film festival was not only a little misleading but slightly surreal.

On the first day while the rest of the bunch visited the famous Ta Er Temple, where a living Buddha blessed my six-month-old son, I stayed in with altitude sickness. That night we dined on local home cooking and had a singing contest at the Tu Minority Village. The next morning we visited the stupendous, crystal blue Qinghai Lake, China’s largest saltwater lake, at 3600meters above sea level. It is a truly amazing, even godly, sight that the photographers in the group feasted their lenses upon. We rushed back for the festival’s grand opening dinner ceremony that evening at which delegates from the local government and foreign VIPs commended each other’s efforts to produce such an interesting and ambitious festival. Karaoke followed dinner and lasted deep into the night.

The next day at the grand opening ceremony it seemed that we were actually going to begin the film part of the festival, but as one visitor noted while meandering around the colossal exhibition hall where we were brought “I feel like we’re all part of a large Ai Weiwei experiment”. This was the actual manifestation of the photography part of the festival. It was a venue that also hosted the glitter saturated opening ceremony (again full of simultaneously translated congratulatory speeches), the film market and oddly, a fashion show. In the exhibition hall rows and rows of mostly landscape photographs were being re-photographed by enthusiasts and what appeared to be soldiers. The market’s unmanned booths eventually led visitors towards the fashion show where models sauntered up and down the runway to the beat of some strange carnival techno tune wearing the same clothes for about twenty minutes and then disappeared. It was here that a local TV crew interviewed me about how I felt about the film festival. Needless to say, I was stumped. Later that same day there was some developments in the direction of a film festival. A forum was held where speaker’s topics included “Introduction to the Creation Status Quo of Chinese Western Mountain Documentary” and “What do viewers expect of a documentary on mountains and climbers?” In the given context these questions took on existential dimensions.

The festival had printed several catalogs for the event that, along with fruit baskets were left in the hotel rooms each day. Some of these publications discussed the history of jade while others listed the films in the festival. There seemed to be interesting films indeed: a film about polyandry in a minority tribe in China, a Dutch film made in North Korea, and a work by Rick Widmer, a filmmaker now living in Beijing, whose film about a Massachusetts’s county fair ended up winning the Jade Kunlun Prize - the Special Jury Prize for Best Social Documentary. There were works from a slew of local stations in China who produced other “mountain” films, basically films about non-Han Chinese minorities and/or actual mountains. There were films from Russia, India, and Germany on topics like goats, agriculture, the environment, man against nature, love, death, and mountains of course. But where were these films? Even Rick didn’t have a copy of his own film for us to watch at the hotel. It wasn’t until the live television awards ceremony that evening (mind you this is the same day that the festival official opened - no need to waste any time) that some films actually made it to the viewers. Before every awards presentation the first 30 seconds to minute of the corresponding film was shown. It wasn’t really enough time to get past the opening credits, or get a gist of the film, but it was a refreshing dose of film, indeed. As we said our sad goodbyes at the airport the next morning we reminded each other of the Buddhist maxim about abandoning expectations. Who said there needed to films at a film festival anyway? We all had a fine time either way. I’ll definitely return next year.

Very little information about the Qinghai 2008世界山地纪录片节 film festival is on line here