Ethics and Experience in the Making of Still Tomorrow: In Conversation with Travis Fan

Abstract

In the blockbuster-dominated landscape of contemporary Chinese cinema, independent documentaries have been all but left behind. After several of China’s largest independent film festivals such as Yunfest and the Beijing Independent Film Festival were forced to shut down, Chinese theatergoers appeared to subsist on a diet of Hollywood superhero movies and local action-fantasy films, caper-comedies, and youth romance movies. During the late 1990s, low-budget Chinese indie documentaries from directors such as Wu Wenguang 吴文光 and Zhang Yuan 张元 used to have the power to change cultural debates; those days have been left far behind.Then, Still Tomorrow, which is a modest documentary about the Poet Yu Xiuhua 余秀华, was produced and earned an estimated 1.7 million RMB at the Chinese box office—a major triumph for a documentary film about a poet in the age of the superhero blockbuster. When looked at alongside other recent documentaries that have been granted not only commercial theatrical release but garnered boxoffice success, such as the record breaking portrait of comfort women Twenty Two (Ershier二十二) in 2017, we see not only the emergence of a new space for independent documentary filmmaking in China, but also a new lens that places women’s issues front and center. Still Tomorrow (Yaoyao huanghuang de renjian 摇摇晃晃的人间) is a stunning, and at times devastating, portrait of one woman’s personal journey that intersects with a series of topics rarely paired together: disability, poetry, celebrity, gender, desire, internet, and the rural-urban divide. At the same time, the film itself, through its remarkable success, has also plotted a new commercial trajectory for independent documentary film in China today.This interview took place at the UCLA Film School on May 4, 2017, after a screening of Still Tomorrow at the Darren Star Screening Room. The discussion begins with the filmmaker’s background and explores his early career in television journalism in China before exploring some of the production details behind his award-winning documentary.