Sharing the office with us are Michael Hong, CEO of ImaginAsian TV, and David Chiu, VP of ImaginAsian TV. I confused their names a lot. David is the one who is going to marry soon, and Michael is the one who is married.
Isabella Tianzi Cai
Reflective Paper on My Internship at dGenerate Films Inc.
From April to September this year, I interned at the New York-based non-theatrical distributor of contemporary independent Chinese feature films and documentaries, dGenerate Films Inc. My job responsibilities there included writing blog articles on contemporary Chinese cinema and related topics, doing marketing research, as well as assisting various office works. Every now and then, I was also asked to translate emails, interviews, and articles from Chinese to English or from English to Chinese. I did these additional assignments delightfully and indefatigably because until I started doing them I had not realized my passion and talent for translation. When I applied for this internship in March, I considered it the perfect internship for me because of my strong interests and background in Chinese politics and culture. After five months of working there, I still think so.
dGenerate Films Inc. has a short but exciting history. Currently Vice President of Programming and Education, Kevin Lee, once told me about its birth story. According to him, the company was founded in 2008 by Karin Chien. Though already a well-established producer, Karin had actually had no connection with native Chinese filmmakers prior to 2007. She learned from Kevin and other business contacts that many award-winning Chinese films did not have any distribution channel in North America. Given that these films could absolutely not be exhibited or distributed legally in China for they touched sensitive issues as the Chinese government deemed, the need to institutionalize their distribution outside China was clamant. Karin flew to China in 2007; through friends and colleagues, she quickly got herself connected to a whole group of Chinese underground independent filmmakers in Beijing and Shanghai. When she came back to the United States, she assembled a group of professionals to start a distribution company. Initially Karin and her team only secured the distribution rights for seven to eight films, but the team’s hard work and dedication expanded the company’s catalog steadily over time. dGenerate now has twenty-six films in its catalog, including Dong, which is a documentary by Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke.
I bore the momentousness of the establishment of the company in mind as I worked there. The first blog article that I was asked to write was on director Xu Xin’s documentary Karamay(2010), which premiered at this year’s 34th Hong Kong International Film Festival. I did not have the chance to watch the documentary, but through research, I learned about it in every detail.Karamay recounts the “12/8/94” fire incident in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China. On that day, a regional schoolchildren dance and singing performance was going on in the Karamay Friendship Theater when a fire broke up in its backstage. Instead of evacuating the children first, the event organizers ordered the children to remain quiet but let the government officials and party members who were present at the event to escape first. Due to time delay as well as failure to open alternative exits, 323 people were killed by the fire, 288 of which were schoolchildren. After the fire, the victims’ families demanded an official apology from the government, but the representatives that they sent to Beijing were escorted back to Xinjiang in custody. Director Xu tracked down some of these people and the victims’ families; he interviewed them about the incident and its aftermath; he finally edited the interviews into a six-hour epic that reexamines the otherwise unknown and forgotten past. I spent one afternoon working on this article, perusing news articles and editorial pieces about the incident as well as people’s blogs. I felt that my effort had its own significance. Even though compared to Xu, I still knew very little about the event, especially the agony experienced by the families, I was able to write about and publish what I had learned about the film on the web, as part of a larger body of journalistic work dedicated to similar politically conscious independent film productions by Chinese directors. The result was truly rewarding and made me feel larger than life.
Over the course of my internship, I have written many more articles that dealt with Chinese politics and culture and Chinese cinema, but I did not focus on the independent cinema frontier exclusively. In July, I was asked to write a piece on China’s most successful box-office director, Feng Xiaogang’s blockbuster Aftershock, which tells the tragic story of a family split apart during the Tangshan Earthquake in 1978, known as the deadliest earthquake in the twentieth century. Because dGenerate owns Du Haibin’s 1428, which is a documentary on the aftermath of the equally deadly Sichuan Earthquake in May 2008, I needed to find a way to tie these two films together – despite their many differences – with some conception of the overall landscape of Chinese cinema. Aftershock was set to be released in China on Wednesday, July 22; I worked till midnight on Monday, July 20 to complete my first draft. Kevin, who was in China at the time, gave me guidelines and instructions through Google Talk. The finished piece was a combined effort of both of us. We agreed that natural disasters such as the earthquakes had their intrinsic value of being used as raw materials for movies; however, different formative and realistic approaches to such raw materials can yield surprisingly divergent results. The approach that Du adopted elevated his documentary the status of a historical record of the aftermath of the Sichuan Earthquake; it presented the alternative story that the state press dismissed; therefore, it is thought-provoking. On the other hand, the approach that Feng undertook aimed at moving movie audiences; it needed to preach love against disasters and adversity; therefore, it is emotionally charged. In Kevin’s edit, he modified the academic tone of my draft, and he shifted the focus more on Du than on Feng. I appreciated these changes because I knew that the final version needed to serve an audience with a special interest in Chinese independent cinema and who was not necessarily an academic. In addition to that, I valued the collaboration process, and I could see its lasting benefit on me as a writer.
My continuing research and writing kept supplying me with new data and insight of Chinese cinema; the need to always tie the new information and ideas to (both the form and the content of) the films owned by dGenerate also forced me to think critically about the larger picture. I agree with the view that many Chinese film scholars and industry figures have already advocated, that is, the commercial cinema and the independent cinema have a symbiotic relationship. Over the past decade, the figures of the Chinese commercial film industry are truly stunning. Just to name a few: in 2002, 38 films were produced under the state’s official production code, but in 2009, the number jumped to 456; from 2004 to 2009, China’s box office grew from $219.6 million to $909 million, with an increase of over 30% per year; in 2010, the expected box office revenue is over $1.4 billion, with the first half of the year already contributing $714 million of that total; lastly, the number of screens in China is still under 5,000, roughly the same as that of South California, but multiplexes are mushrooming steadily all over China. Yet, these figures only tell half the story because the other half, that is, the figures of China’s underground productions, are challenging for anyone to tally. The best anyone can do is to follow up with these underground productions. If such films are not winning awards at international film festivals, they can be found at independent theaters and art houses (although I have to add, more true in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Yunnan than anywhere else). News reports on them are available to read too if one knows where to look.
Besides blog articles, the other big task that I was assigned to do was marketing research. I made use of Google Alert to stay updated about Chinese cinema. I used the links that were sent to me daily in my Google Alert emails to find out about the most active Chinese film enthusiasts and the most popular websites on Chinese cinema. By doing that, I updated and expanded the company’s press lists. I also researched on cinema studies professors in American universities, picking out those who specialized in Chinese cinema or related fields, such as East Asian Studies, Modern Chinese Language and Literature, etc. Earlier on in the summer, I was asked to compile a list of organizations that sponsored free summer outdoor movie screenings in a number of cities here. I heard from my supervisor that summer was a slow season for the company, so additional revenue needed to be brought in through such channels. I was aware of the “China’s Past and Present” film series at Asia Society this March just before I started working at dGenerate. All the films shown there were all from us. However, I am not positive that we supplied our films to another film series this summer, at least not that I know of.
I mentioned translation as my joy of life, which remained undiscovered until I worked at dGenerate. At first, I was only asked to add time codes to a transcription that someone else had done. Kevin posted the videos of the interview on Youtube, and I was responsible to cut up the transcription into single lines and enter the exact seconds in the format of “0:00:00.000,0:00:00.000” for them. The interview lasted 45 minutes, but it took me almost two working days to get the .sbv files right so that they could be read by Youtube and be displayed as subtitles. I could not have possibly enjoyed such a tedious job if Kevin did not give me the next interview to translate and transcribe. The interview was with director Jian Yi at Beijing Apple Store. It was the third interview of a conversation series that we cosponsored with Apple Inc. The translation was smooth. Although I had always been worried that I did not know how to say many technical terms in Chinese, when I heard these Chinese terms, their English equivalents came to mind surprisingly fast. I think that it has to do with the fact that I have had an English education since fifteen, and I tend to process studies-related information in English rather than in Chinese. After the Jian Yi interview, I got assignments to translate interviews every now and then. I translated and transcribed an interview with Zhao Liang; I transcribed a Question and Answer session with Zhao Liang at Asia Society; I translated interviews that were published at other websites with Yang Jin and Huang Weikai; I translated an article written by Jia Zhangke; I also translated bits and pieces of articles for my blog posts as well as many emails that Karin needed to send out to the directors in our contact list. The more I do it, the better at it I get.
Overall, this internship has been a valuable experience. It matched my interests, and I enjoyed working hard for them.
