The Longwang Chronicles

Xiang cun dang an

(China, 2007, 90 mins)

DV Cam

International Premiere

PROD: Li Yifan, Qian Jian
CAM/ED: Li Yifan

Li Yifan's documentary chronicles, with a fiercely analytical eye, one year in the life of Longwang village, a typically poor farming village located near Chongqing, China. Li structures his film according to the traditional Chinese almanac, with various seasons revealing a different aspect of the interplay of Chinese Communist Party government and impoverished rural life today.

The indomitable village party secretary Xiang Xinchun conducts good-natured (though occasionally hard-edged) debates with her fellow villagers on government generosity, free speech, and the enforcement of ideological control. Details of daily life--castrating pigs, harvesting rice, crushing rocks to build a new road with bare hands--alternate with more ideologically freighted moments. In one fascinating sequence, the squabbling Christian and pseudo-Christian sects in the village somehow allow their internecine rivalries to be filmed. We see a pastor of the official church scold underground heretics, bribe and recruit an informant, and even cast a Satanic snake out of a Daoist shrine he gleefully demolishes. Later, Li films the machinations involved in what can kindly be called a loosely supervised local election.

Arid Communist Party slogans such as "building a new socialist countryside" take on specific meaning in this scrupulously objective, precisely shot, often implicitly ironic and always compassionately engaged almanac of a year of rural Chinese life.

-- Shelly Kraicer

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