2008 5/12 1428 Sichuan
2010 6/21 0800 Los Angeles
I have been hearing about the L.A. Film Festival for the past a few days, but nothing really drove me to go to one of these screenings, until I heard about “1428.”
“1428” – a documentary on the 8.0 mega earthquake happened in Sichuan, China on 14:28, May 12th, 2008. This documentary was made independently, and will not/can not be distributed in Mainland China due the sensitivity of this issue and, apparently, according to the person from Degenerative film (the distributor of “1428” in the north America region) independent filmmaking is illegal in China. This documentary focuses on the lives of the victims in the disaster zone, and the aftermath of the killing quake. As the director said, this film is a response to all the reports and portrayals of this disaster in the mainstream media in China, and he was aiming to bring the audience something that we could not see in the mainstream media.
And he succeeded in doing so.
When the lights were out, and the first collapsed building appeared on the screen, I knew that I had different feelings and emotions from every other person sitting here with me. For them, it’s a striking, horrifying scene that happened in a remote place in China. But for me, it’s home.
I’m from Sichuan. And the epicenter was only 85 miles away from my home city, Chengdu, where all my family live. I don’t want to talk about the actual event. I have heard and talked too much about this disaster for the past two years. I wasn’t in Chengdu when it happened: I was couple thousand miles away in England. But I remember how I felt when I heard about the number of death in this megaquake on the news, and how I felt when I couldn’t reach my family on phone after the disaster stroke.
But Du Haibin didn’t give us any of those emotions. There have been a number of documentaries before “1428” that are about the Sichuan earthquake, including the Academy-nominated short documentary - China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province. I have watched most of them, and many of them are very emotionally arousing and you break down to tears halfway through the film. But “1428” is different. Despite the emotional attachment I have with this subject, I didn’t have a single tear during the film. The documentary is cold, extremely objective, and blatantly candid. Even there is a strong presence of the filmmaker, he does not offer his own position, or force his emotions onto the audience. He positions himself as an outsider, an observer, and a recorder.
The previous documentaries have mainly focused on the lost lives, the grieving survivors, the collapsed schools, and the conflict between the victims and the Communist government. But Du offers something different. He shows us the lives of the survivors, and how they are trying to move on with their lives after their families and friends are gone. He gives voice to those very ordinary people without any sensitization or dramatization, which filled the mainstream media reports and even the Academy-nominated short documentary. In comparison, “1428” is an honest film, sometimes too honest and can be “boring” for some people. It has many trivial details that have no particular tension or drama. These are the things that we don’t see in the media because they don’t make a “good story.” And this, I think, is what Du means when he said that this film is a response to the mainstream media.
There are a few scenes that stroke me:
When the filmmaker interviewed the survivors, most people expressed that the Communist government had good policies for dealing with the quake, but it’s the local government that did not follow these policies. For remote places like Wenchuan or Beichuan, in a bureaucratic governmental system, it is hard for the central government to monitor what is actually going on at the bottom. In “1428,” you can hear people passionately praise the Communist party, saying that they are lucky to have a government that is willing to help them in such conditions. But at the same time, I also hear scornful laughs coming from a few people sitting behind me – yes, for an average American citizen who has mainly been exposed to the negative aspects and scandals of the Chinese Communist government, these survivors’ appreciation seem like a product of media propaganda. However, when you look into their eyes, you see that the belief is actually their source of hope that helps them to get through the hardest times. It’s very difficult to make a moral judgment here, and Du just simply shows us this, leaving the room for us to make our own meanings based our own beliefs.
Another scene is when an old lady complains to the filmmaker about how she could not get her share of an electric blanket. Later, the people behind her start asking the filmmaker whether he will cut or edit what he films: “if you are not going to cut your film, we will tell you the truth. If you are going to cut your film, we will stop talking now.” This blatantly shows the people’s desire for freedom of expression. They understand that the media is not about the “truth,” and it is extremely difficult to get their voices heard. Censorship and freedom of expression is a very sensitive issue in China, and we have a long way to go for fighting for our “freedom of expression.”
After seeing all kinds of dramatizing and sensationalizing portrayal of this disaster, I’m glad that Du is able to offer us something fresh and honest that stirs more thinking than grieving. We have had enough tears and despairs, and maybe it’s time to look at this catastrophe with a fresh set of eyes. Just like what the high-school student says at the end of this film - he has an unconventional hairstyle, fashionable clothes, and is listening to his iPod near the disaster-restricted zone. Other people tell him to watch his behavior, but he replies, “I lost dozens of family members and friends down there. But the dead are dead. We have to live in reality, don’t we?”
