土产品的土产品

I spent 5 hours watching 6 award-winning documentaries at IDFA. Hard day… My general feeling is that the borderline of a documentary and a feature movie is even more blur. Many documentaries are seems to tell stories with fixed interpretations (and they assure you that is the whole story) . There are not so much space left for you to judge. On the other hand, there are fewer limitations on how do you tell the stories in documentaries. Probably, you can design some rough plot then let go to see what you can get from the flow of time as in Constantin and Elena. You can add some artificial scenes to dramatize your story as it is in Silver Wolf Award winner Boris Ryzhy. Or you can even just make animations out of your audio record as in Slaves – An Animated Documentary. You can also tell some stories about a dead dog while making your point on something else as in Wanja. More and more often, the film maker let the subjects participate in the making of the film by some other interactions rather than just being recorded, even some offline project extensions like what they did in Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids . In the end you can remix stuffs and collect others’ creativity according to the manifesto in one of the coolest documentaries: RIP-A Remix Manifesto.

Among those pieces, what I love most is the Joris Ivens award winner Burma VJ - Reporting From a Closed Country. It simply made me in tears. It aroused something emotional at the back of my mind which I can’t explain here. I think we should cherish what we had improved in our country for the past 20 years. Fortunately, it is somehow getting to a different plot now in China, at least I believe so.

BTW I also saw a documentary about this famous Dutch documentary director Joris Ivens few month ago. It is called An old friend of Chinese People. This title makes much more sense than it seems, if you translate it into Chinese and know a bit of the relevant history. I didn’t really get the point of that documentary but it is definitely something worth knowing about the controversial issues between Ivens and China. I think the most important point of any sort of art is that you should be sincere when you make it. I can’t really judge it in Ivens’ case, need to know much more.

BTW I wanna be boss will be on Dutch TV NL2 tonight @20:55.