Cong Feng

Eight characters, trapped inside surreal spaces.

"Huangyangchuan, Gansu province, China. It's an arid mountain area with poor roads. Ma Bingcheng is well-respected local doctor, so many patients (most of them farmers) come to see him every day. In his small clinic, people chat with each other about their lives, local conditions, or the people they know. The clinic seems to open up like a microcosm, the information and experiences of different people intertwine, revealing the conditions of typical Chinese farmers, and the typical fates of both young and old--"

A very special event that took place immediately following the 2009 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Furuyashiki Village. They held a ‘dojo,’ a school where the veteran independent filmmakers from Japan taught the younger generation of independent filmmakers from China and Japan. They watched films, shot and hand-developed Super-8 films. Participants: Azuma Mieko, Cong Feng, Huang Weikai, Ji Dan, Kawabe Ryota, Mao Chenyu, Sato Leo, and others... The participants formed teams. Each received a camera, several rolls of film, and a CD with (mostly urban) sounds to use as a soundtrack. They were to plan and shoot a short film using in-camera editing. (total 4 short films).

A documentary about houses in rural Gansu decorated with portraits of Mao Zedong. More importantly: a documentary about the people who dwell within them.

This short film is dedicated to those who are dead during the lockdown period in Wuhan in 2020.

Since 2020, the beginning of Coronavirus, "Shouting in the building" this phenomenon caught my attention countless times. It does not seem to me that people are Shouting, but that the buildings, the rooms themselves, are Shouting, and it embodies the throbbing of the earth itself in the new age we live in.

This is a film both about the spectacle and the space, about how the spectacle has caused the mutation of the (physical and phycological) space in which we reside. This film is determined to be the ‘film on space’ of our times, an epic theater, the general observation of the geological structure of this time. I therefore invent or re-invent some terms for my purpose: Archae(now)logy; Ruinology; space bankruptcy; theater of life -- theater of cruelty -- theater of spectacle; the body-film; the New Berlin Wall - Iron Curtain; and “refugees without camps”, ‘the plants”, “the ghosts,” the asthenosphere, dark energy... I have stolen a great amount of found footages/ready materials or already existed films. This “stealing” is exactly the way to get connected with history and the history of film, to construct an “echo film”.

The filmmaker spent years in a Chinese village to record daily life’s every detail. He drank many a glass with the villagers and observed them for so long that he started to recognize their repeating patterns of behavior. That is why there is no end to this tale.