Navigating on the Ruins: Space, Power, and History in Contemporary Chinese Independent Documentaries

Abstract

Independent documentary filmmaking in contemporary China started a few sparkles after 1989, with works like Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (1990) and Wang Guangli’s I Graduated (1992). Followed by more developed works from Zhang Yuan, Duan Jinchuan, Jiang Yue, and Kang Jianning, China began to see perhaps its first independent documentary group: the New Documentary Movement. Later, with the advent of the DV technology in the mid-1990s, the freedom of one-man’s-film-studio became easily realizable; China further witnessed a spate of independent documentaries pouring forth, with a greater variety in subject matter and style, and a greater variety of faces, lives, spaces, and voices along with them.