Here is how Melody, the Chinese half of our xploring team in Chongqing described Li Yi Fan after a long evening of beers, cigarettes and endless conversations about the two sides of fast changing China.
Li Yi Fan is a photograph and documentary director that tries to capture through his work the two sides of changes affecting China and above all in Chongqing his home region. Two years ago, he made a documentary film called ‘Before the flood’, where he shows the total destruction of a millenary city called Fengjie by its own inhabitants. Reason for this being the construction of the biggest dam in the world, the Three Gorges Dam which made the water level of the Yang Tse Kiang rise enough to force the transfer of more than a million people in the region (this politically sensitive initiative being the reason for the creation of the special Chongqing administrative region, which like Shanghai and Shenzhen directly depends from the central government).
Yi Fan spent 11 months in the city of Fengjie, filming its inhabitants being given no option by the local government but to destroy themselves their own house before being relocated in a new city created from scratch, where they had to pay to compensate for the fact that their new house was more modern than the previous one!
His film was shown in a couple of film festivals abroad, including Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam film festivals. This foreign success, he modestly adds, finance his production and makes him one of the only two Chinese documentary films directors that can earn money today in China. In China his films are rarely shown and not available on DVD and in Chongqing they are even banned except in universities.
Melody tells him that we would like to go to Fengjie to interview people and observe how they feel now about this extreme metaphor of change in China. He tells us that there is no need to go there; everybody would tell us that they are happy now, and they would mean it!
According to him, these people like any people from Sichuan (Chongqing used to be part of Sichuan administratively, but still is very much, culturally speaking) consider themselves as the happiest in the world.
But would the reaction had been much different if we had been anywhere else in China?
Things change so fast in China, that what was revolting to most is often quickly forgotten. That is what makes the value of Li Yi Fan’s work even greater. A man who seldom uses adjectives, a man who doesn’t try to move people through artificial or overstated emotions, but just by showing reality as it is.
Li Yi Fan is a photograph and documentary director that tries to capture through his work the two sides of changes affecting China and above all in Chongqing his home region. Two years ago, he made a documentary film called ‘Before the flood’, where he shows the total destruction of a millenary city called Fengjie by its own inhabitants. Reason for this being the construction of the biggest dam in the world, the Three Gorges Dam which made the water level of the Yang Tse Kiang rise enough to force the transfer of more than a million people in the region (this politically sensitive initiative being the reason for the creation of the special Chongqing administrative region, which like Shanghai and Shenzhen directly depends from the central government).
Yi Fan spent 11 months in the city of Fengjie, filming its inhabitants being given no option by the local government but to destroy themselves their own house before being relocated in a new city created from scratch, where they had to pay to compensate for the fact that their new house was more modern than the previous one!
His film was shown in a couple of film festivals abroad, including Berlin, Paris and Amsterdam film festivals. This foreign success, he modestly adds, finance his production and makes him one of the only two Chinese documentary films directors that can earn money today in China. In China his films are rarely shown and not available on DVD and in Chongqing they are even banned except in universities.
Melody tells him that we would like to go to Fengjie to interview people and observe how they feel now about this extreme metaphor of change in China. He tells us that there is no need to go there; everybody would tell us that they are happy now, and they would mean it!
According to him, these people like any people from Sichuan (Chongqing used to be part of Sichuan administratively, but still is very much, culturally speaking) consider themselves as the happiest in the world.
But would the reaction had been much different if we had been anywhere else in China?
Things change so fast in China, that what was revolting to most is often quickly forgotten. That is what makes the value of Li Yi Fan’s work even greater. A man who seldom uses adjectives, a man who doesn’t try to move people through artificial or overstated emotions, but just by showing reality as it is.
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