Reel China Documents
Disappearing Way of Life

Qi Wang tells us that China has not had a tradition of individual documentaries. But the widespread availability of digital cameras has revealed a great yearning among its people to document everything – before it disappears. Wang, Assistant Professor, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, is curator of the 4th Reel China Documentary Biennial film collection which debuted in October at NYU. Selections from this year’s 33 documentaries and narratives will circulate to organizations and institutes around the world.
For Wang, the project involved travelling to China to gather works that are scattered among individual filmmakers. "Given the context of sea change in China – political, economic, cultural, and geographical – the old country and urban lifestyles are shattered much as buildings are being demolished."
Wang says there is an urgency to preserve the memory of everything and, through film, express the fundamental questions that dislocated peasants and marginalized peoples are dealing with: How do people see themselves in this new China? What does it mean to be Chinese in this age of transformation and globalization? Questions of identity, gender and sex and ethnicity crop up in accompaniment with rapid modernization, urbanization, housing projects and new youth culture and so on.” An example is one of Wang’s favorite films this year, Deer Raiser in Aoluguya. The narrative focuses on the descent of the nation’s primeval forest dwellers into alcoholism and profound sadness as they are forced to abandon their traditional life.
The works Wang collects are all produced outside official government channels and cannot yet be shown there. "I think this is a very important phenomenon in terms of historical documentaries," says Wang. "The value is beyond the present. It represents a cultural memory of very diverse topics of use to scholars and friends of many disciplines."
Wang and her colleagues at Reel China are attempting to establish a physical archive of the films at Beijing University. She hopes to bring Reel China to Georgia Tech within two years.