Unknown awards and screenings at a fake competition: How four films tried to tell China’s story – Hong Kong Free Press
This May, one yr after the Cannes Film Festival antagonised the Chinese authorities by exhibiting Kiwi Chow’s Revolution of Our Times, a documentary sympathetic to Hong Kong’s 2019 professional-democracy protesters, it devoted display time to a movie that took the other angle.
In Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again, China isn't the autocratic oppressor however the benevolent ruler, serving to the town get better from political chaos and climate its worst Covid-19 outbreak.
In a picture shared in a number of on-line press releases and on Chinese social media, a supposed viewers member viewing “Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again” is proven holding up a poster of the movie, with the phrases “A Film by Benoît Lelièvre” clearly seen. Photo: China Media Project.
According to a press launch revealed on June 1, “The audience applauded for 3 minutes after the screening.” Some, it stated, have been “stunned and their impressions of Hong Kong were refreshed.”
It added that the movie had additionally lately gained the Best Documentary Award at the Prague Film Festival, the place, in accordance to one other article, it had to be proven once more to accommodate the throngs of people that needed to see it.
Were the viewpoints of the Chinese Communist Party lastly gaining floor overseas?
The story didn't maintain up to scrutiny. As Twitter consumer Okay Tse and Czech outlet Deník N reported, there isn't a Prague Film Festival, simply two individuals confirmed up for a screening of the movie, and promotional pictures have been based mostly on inventory pictures. While the movie had been in Cannes, it had not been proven at the celebrated competition, like Revolution of Our Times, however at the concurrent Marché du Films, a market the place screenings may be purchased.
The movie’s press releases fooled some within the Cantonese neighborhood who favored a associated publish on social media, assuming with out nearer inspection this should be one other professional-democracy documentary conserving hope alive. But in any other case, the obvious propaganda try withered on the vine.
Screenshot of “Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again,” through which two pals focus on the 2019 protests in Hong Kong as a time of disruption and chaos – the blame falling squarely on protesters. Photo: China Media Project.
Trying to unravel extra of the thriller, the China Media Project adopted a complicated path of individuals and initiatives and discovered that Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again is a part of a set of documentaries that espouse Communist Party narratives.
Token foreigners and doubtful abroad movie festivals appear to have been concerned to give the works a veneer of worldwide pedigree. And seemingly at the centre of all of it stands an indie filmmaker from China — an instance, maybe, of how Chinese artists can discover themselves compelled to combine ardour initiatives with propaganda.
‘Intelligent talent levels’
Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again is, by any measure, a mediocre movie. It follows a number of Hong Kong residents as they speak about how a Covid-19 outbreak in early 2022 affected the town. The movie is narrated by a center-aged white man recognized solely as Alex, who says that he moved to Hong Kong in 2000.
Just a few instances, individuals within the movie hyperlink the outbreak to the chaos of the 2019 professional-democracy protests. For Henry, a Cantonese opera apprentice, his fundamental reminiscence of these demonstrations is that they delayed his bus to the theatre as soon as and that he arrived simply in time. When he received Covid-19, he recollects, a good friend despatched him medication from mainland China.
Another character, a man referred to as Dolphin, is described as “a dream-seeker from this bay” whose job is chilly-calling individuals about investing in metaverse shares. When speaking to a colleague, he explains that future cooperation with mainland China, in addition to the event of the Greater Bay Area, will lead to higher financial prospects for Hong Kong. He praises “mainland China’s intelligent talent levels.”
Screenshot of “Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again,” with reward for China’s Central Government and its actions through the pandemic. Photo: China Media Project.
Many conversations sound equally stilted, if not outright scripted. In one scene, two individuals having a supposedly spontaneous dialog about how the Covid-19 pandemic reminds them of the 2019 demonstrations stroll into the view of a stationary digicam and cease to say goodbye. Alex’s voiceover is commonly oddly phrased, and in some scenes the footage doesn’t match the audio.
The movie ends with Henry receiving the information that his theater has reopened, adopted by information clips of the town loosening restrictions as case figures drop.
Then the credit roll — arguably probably the most attention-grabbing a part of the movie.
An absentee crew
The crew listed for Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again consists of individuals whose involvement is questionable, who deny having labored on the movie, or who can’t be discovered.
Benoît Lelièvre, a French trainer and filmmaker who lived in China for a number of years, is credited because the director. How a lot he really labored on the movie is unclear. According to a publish on Facebook, he left China in late 2019 and hasn’t been again since.
Lelièvre didn't reply to requests for remark from CMP or different journalists. Sometime over the previous two months, he seems to have deleted pictures of himself posing subsequent to promotional supplies for the movie from his LinkedIn web page. “Still in Cannes for a few days where I presented to the film market the last two docus, which I signed and shot in China,” his publish learn, “and met again many friends.”
A composite of three pictures initially public on LinkedIn exhibiting Benoît Lelièvre at Cannes with two films he referred to as “the last two docus, which I signed and shot in China.” The poster at far left, simply at Lelièvre’s elbow, exhibits a nonetheless of “Alex” from a scene in “Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again” seen by CMP. Photo: China Media Project.
Aside from the 2 individuals listed as consultants, CMP might determine not one of the crew members listed within the credit. All however one of many crew members listed as having been concerned within the making of the Hong Kong movie have non-Chinese names. The credit point out no manufacturing firm. Nor do they credit score the narrator, “Alex.” They checklist a co-producer, however not a producer.
Who, then, made Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again? Several connections recommend it might have been Chinese documentary director Jin Huaqing (金华青) or his Hangzhou-based firm, Jin Huaqing Film Studio.
Jin, 38, is an up-and-coming director whose most up-to-date work, Dark Red Forest, about Tibetan nuns, was internationally properly-acquired final yr. In messages to China Media Project, Jin denies any involvement with Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again. But there are connections, together with a number of comparable films, which he refuses to clarify.
For one, the Prague cinema that screened Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again shared the personal Vimeo web page containing the movie with Deník N. The account was named “Huaqing Jin.” Within a day of the China Media Project sending Jin the hyperlink, the account’s identify was modified to “little observer.”
At left, the identify “Huaqing Jin” seems on the Vimeo account that was shared with reporters within the Czech Republic for “Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again” in June 2022. At proper, the identical account modifications to “little observer” after CMP contacts filmmaker Jin Huaqing to focus on his attainable involvement within the movie. Photo: China Media Project.
In 2020, Jin’s Dark Red Forest took half in Visions du Réel, a Swiss movie competition, as a “work in progress.” Jasmin Bašić, Senior Industry Consultant at the competition, gave suggestions on the then-unfinished documentary and ended up being credited as a marketing consultant.
It is the one hyperlink she will be able to consider that may clarify how she ended up listed as a marketing consultant for Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again, a movie she had by no means heard of earlier than talking with the China Media Project.
The China-Crete connection
The second marketing consultant listed for Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again is Eleni Vlassi. She is a filmmaker in addition to the inventive director and president of the International Documentary Festival of Ierapetra, or IDFI, a small movie competition held yearly on the Greek island of Crete.
The competition has a sturdy, if unusual, reference to China. In 2016, Jin’s The Tibetan Girl, a documentary about a Tibetan singer, gained the Audience Award. For the next version, in accordance to the competition’s web site, “IDFI has also the honour, this year, to welcome China Dream which is a spectacular coordination of our Festival with the 9 largest International Festivals of China.” This China Dream programme appears not to have been introduced anyplace else.
Text on web page two of the competition booklet of the International Documentary Festival of Ierapetra, or IDFI, which mentions a screening program referred to as “China Dream.” Photo: China Media Project.
Over the subsequent few years, this worldwide cooperation concerned handing out awards to varied people with no obvious hyperlink to filmmaking — together with two “researchers” of conventional Chinese tradition and a conventional Chinese medication practitioner — who as a substitute appear largely excited by bolstering their doubtful credentials with overseas awards.
Jin attended IDFI at least twice, in 2018 and in 2019, when he was a member of the Jury for Young Filmmakers. Benoît Lelièvre additionally attended that yr, and the three of them — He, Jin, and Vlassi — at one level through the opening ceremony shared the stage, pictures on the competition’s web site present.
A yr earlier, the three of them additionally took half in the Silk Road Cup (International) Film Support Program, an occasion in Xian, in China’s Shaanxi province. They seem collectively in a number of pictures from the occasion, which was coated by native and nationwide media, together with China Central Television and China.com.cn, the federal government web site run by the State Council Information Office.
The firm internet hosting the occasion, Haining Film and Culture Communication Co Ltd, has labored carefully with native propaganda departments to produce films that “tell China’s story well,” a phrase at the moment synonymous with the Communist Party’s home and worldwide propaganda efforts.
The firm’s CEO, Chinese movie producer Wang Haining (王海宁), instructed these gathered at the occasion that he welcomed “friends from all over the world to come to Xi’an, China to exchange films, invest in films, and promote films.”
Vlassi (third from left), Jin Huaqing (ninth from left) and Lelièvre (eight from left) seem onstage collectively at the 2019 IDFI. Photo: China Media Project.
Also current as deputy chairman of the occasion was Li Xuezheng (李学政), head of the Golden Shield Television Center of China’s Central Military Commission (CMC), the nation’s highest nationwide defence physique. Li, who leads propaganda movie and tv manufacturing for the People’s Liberation Army, instructed the media through the occasion that “telling China’s story well” was the “true path toward internationalisation and promotion” of Chinese movie.
Despite intersecting with Vlassi and Lelièvre at these occasions, and regardless of sharing the stage, Jin says that he doesn't know Lelièvre, and that he has by no means cooperated with Vlassi. What makes these denials odder nonetheless is that Jin is credited with having co-directed documentaries with each of them.
The Xinjiang films
Supposedly, Lelièvre and Jin directed a 2021 documentary referred to as Ripples, the second of the “the last two docus” Lelièvre beforehand recognized on his LinkedIn account as initiatives he had “signed and shot in China.”
Ripples, too, is a movie that promotes the Chinese authorities’s stance on a delicate political challenge – this time denying overseas accusations of pressured labour within the cotton business of Xinjiang, the area the place the Chinese state has, over the previous few years, positioned over a million members of the Uyghur and different Muslim minorities in indoctrination camps.
The movie describes the consequences of the ensuing worldwide bans on Xinjiang cotton on Uyghurs residing in Yiwu, a buying and selling hub in Eastern China, in accordance to critiques on filmfestivals.com — a web site, one business insider says, that publishes content material with out a lot in the best way of editorial assessment. The web site’s editor didn't reply to messages from CMP.
Ripples doesn't seem to be out there anyplace on-line. Jin denies having made it, and Lelièvre refuses to discuss. The Xinjiang cotton challenge flared up in late 2020, after he left China. Whether or not Lelièvre made the movie, he did promote Ripples at the Cannes Marché du Films this yr, in accordance to the now-deleted pictures from his LinkedIn web page in addition to a press launch.
A screenshot of Uyghur youngsters proven dancing in a picturesque alley, a widespread trope, within the documentary “Splendid Land.” The narrator’s voice is equivalent to that in “Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again.” Photo: China Media Project.
Also in 2021, in accordance to the web site of Vlassi’s IDFI, she and Jin co-directed Splendid Land, a movie instructed by way of an English man reminiscing about a journey he made to Xinjiang a number of years prior, in accordance to a filmfestivals.com weblog publish. It says, opposite to the systematic oppression reported within the area, that Xinjiang individuals are “living freely in their ideal beautiful home.”
A brief clip is obtainable on YouTube. Just two minutes lengthy, it options a minimum of three separate scenes of Uyghurs dancing, a widespread trope, and loads of odd phrases. “In the streets of ethnic customs, a lively life sonata is in the air,” says the narrator, who sounds unmistakably just like the “Alex” who gives the voiceover for Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again.
Vlassi’s movie did properly at her personal competition. According to the IDFI web site, Splendid Land gained the Best International Short Documentary Award in addition to the Audience Award in 2021.
Jin, once more, denies any involvement. Much like Lelièvre, nothing about Vlassi’s social media presence suggests she has visited China for the reason that begin of the pandemic. When contacted by telephone, Vlassi requested CMP to ship questions by way of textual content message, after which she by no means replied or answered additional calls.
Hong Kong, Please Shining Again
Jin has yet another propaganda documentary to his identify, the 2020 movie Hong Kong, Please Shining Again, out there on YouTube.
In 15 minutes, the movie offers the Chinese authorities’s model of the 2019 protests, explaining that these “radical violent crimes” have been supported by “Western anti-China” forces, aided by middlemen like professional-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai, and undermined Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability. The movie ends with the fiction that the nationwide safety regulation is extensively supported within the metropolis. “Hong Kong and the Mainland are connected by blood,” it says.
File Photo: May James.
Narrated with the baritone voice model typical of applications on state tv in China, the movie appears directed at a home viewers. Regardless, Hong Kong, Please Shining Again gained “Best Foreign Language Film” at Vlassi’s IDFI in 2020.
This obvious abroad recognition regardless of its stylistic affinities with Chinese state propaganda would possibly level to an essential side of the thriller surrounding Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again, the more moderen movie with an oddly reminiscent title.
Contrary to the opposite three films, which have barely any presence in Chinese on-line areas, the 2020 movie’s award win is cited and celebrated in a number of locations, together with in Party newspaper Guangming Daily.
Junius Ho, a pro-China Hong Kong politician, talked about the movie on his Facebook web page in June 2020, sharing a associated report from the information outlet HK01. Another optimistic report on the movie was revealed by the Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper linked to China’s central authorities.
Junius Ho. Photo: Legislative Council, by way of Flickr.
All of those stories observe the movie’s IDFI award, and each the Ta Kung Pao and HK01 quote Vlassi as saying: “We believe that this film is a good way to convey to the world the voice of China, and the voice of Hong Kong, and allow the world to see the people behind the chaos in Hong Kong, and to see the true record of China’s defence of national sovereignty and justice. We hope more people can see the real Hong Kong.”
Vlassi didn't reply to a request to verify this direct quote, which resembles the token overseas voices typically offered in Chinese state media to lend help with good Party platitudes.
Clearly, overseas recognition was an essential step in selling Hong Kong, Please Shining Again within the Chinese-language press as a movie legitimising the Chinese authorities’s place on occasions in Hong Kong.
Partaking in such overt propaganda productions would appear like a departure for Jin, whose films Dark Red Forest and The Tibetan Girl are subtly essential of how the Chinese authorities treats ethnic minorities. But he wouldn’t be the primary impartial-minded Chinese filmmaker to, at instances, play together with the federal government.
Beijing National Stadium, often known as the Bird’s Nest. Photo: noeltock, by way of Flickr.
Zhang Yimou, celebrated for films essential of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution like To Live, was criticised for guiding the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. Filmmakers change their films to safe permission for home distribution. In 2009, a complete checklist of stars lined up for small elements in propaganda blockbuster The Founding of a Republic.
It’s not unusual in China for indie filmmakers, whose works are sometimes too politically delicate to be proven domestically, to tackle work for state departments. “I also made several propaganda documentaries for China Central Television,” one Chinese documentary director tells the China Media Project. “Sometimes it’s for money, sometimes the topics are interesting.”
Producer and promoter
When journalists at Deník N regarded into Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again, they came upon that a man named Wang Jie (王杰) had organised the Prague screening and organized for an unmarked advertorial to be revealed about it in English-language publication Prague Morning. Interviewees stated that he had referred to himself because the movie’s producer.
Wang — who blocked China Media Project on WeChat as quickly as he came upon he was talking with a overseas journalist — is a main shareholder and the managing director of a firm referred to as Film Casting Culture Co Ltd (江苏片投影视文化有限公司), positioned in Nanjing, jap China. It has made at least one propaganda title for a native authorities in Shaanxi province.
Jin, too, has a Shaanxi connection. In 2017, he signed a contract with Shaanxi Cultural Industry Investment Group, a state-owned firm majority owned by the Party’s provincial propaganda division, although it's unclear what their settlement was about. When requested, Jin denies understanding Wang, regardless of the latter being listed because the cinematographer for 2 of Jin’s brief films, Sheep Dotting Hillsides and The Tibetan Girl.
Screenshot of pictures on the “6th Prague Film Festival” web site purporting to present the competition in 2022. Photo: China Media Project.
Besides making films, Wang and his firm dabble on the planet of make-consider film competitions. According to a 2019 Hollywood Reporter article, the emergence of on-line platforms corresponding to FilmFreemanner, the place filmmakers can submit their work to festivals world wide, has spawned hundreds of festivals that run the gamut from minor however real occasions to downright scams which can be out for the submission charges of aspiring filmmakers.
The Prague Film Festival, the place Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again was supposedly proven to nice acclaim, doesn't exist. But it does have a web page on FilmFreemanner and a web site. Its area, registration historical past exhibits, was linked to somebody who crammed out “NanJing” as their location.
Photos on the web site purportedly exhibiting a screening of Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again have been repurposed from an precise occasion held greater than two years in the past at the cinema talked about within the advertorial. In 2021, Ripples additionally reportedly gained awards at the Prague competition.
According to a number of enterprise itemizing web sites, together with one in Jiangsu province the place Wang Jie is reportedly positioned, Film Casting Culture at one level arrange two web sites, “Film Festival Sign-Up Site” (电影节报名网) and “Movie Submission Site” (片投网), that sound like Chinese equivalents of FilmFreemanner.
The websites claimed affiliation with a number of of the most important world movie festivals, together with the Oscars, Cannes, and the BAFTAs – however neither is now on-line. The enterprise listings on Film Casting Culture additionally declare that the corporate started cooperating in 2019 with a New York-based movie firm referred to as Intellect Pictures to arrange a global community of movie festivals.
A screenshot of Intellect Pictures’ Facebook web page. Photo: Screenshot.
Intellect Pictures solely deepens the sense of mirage and fakery. The firm seems nowhere in US company listings, in New York State, or elsewhere. Its web site consists of clearly faked bios of firm workers, lots of them repetitive and overlapping. Several bios are cross-listed at IMDB, an internet database of data associated to movie and tv, having been posted by “Alex Davidson,” listed because the founder of Intellect Pictures.
In Prague, in accordance to Deník N, one other documentary referred to as Success Formula was screened alongside Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again. This Intellect Pictures manufacturing, which is everywhere in the firm’s web site and social media accounts, combines interviews with celebrities to distil “a universal formula for success that humanity may eventually be able to use,” in accordance to a trailer.
This weird doubleheader was organized by Wang Jie and a intermediary, who, in accordance to Deník N, claimed to be Alex Davidson. He stated he lived in Canada and that he's the Alex who narrates the Hong Kong movie. His WhatsApp profile, nevertheless, was linked to a Russian telephone quantity and recognized him as Sergei, a discrepancy he declined to clarify to the Czech information web site.
When contacted by the China Media Project, his story modifications. He calls himself Sergei and says that Alex Davidson is one in every of his many colleagues at Intellect Pictures. His collaboration with Wang Jie in Prague was the one time the 2 labored collectively, Sergei claims.
But Nanjing’s Film Casting Culture and the mysterious Intellect Pictures appear to have arrange a big range of movie festivals that seem largely fictitious. Possibly as a result of FilmFreemanner requires each newly registered competition to show it has secured a venue, in-individual occasions have been organised as soon as for a number of of the festivals, such because the decidedly low-key 2017 version of the “Atlanta Award-Qualifying Film Festival.”
World Film Fair. Photo: Screenshot, by way of World Film Fair.
But later “events” appear solely to contain the asserting of winners on-line, alongside photoshopped pictures to faux in any other case. On the Atlanta competition’s FilmFreemanner web page, deadlines are arising for a 2023 version.
The jewel within the crown of the 2 corporations’ movie competition line-up is World Film Fair, an occasion promising to carry collectively movie festivals from everywhere in the world, a trailer posted to the Intellect Pictures YouTube channel introduced. According to Baidu Baike, an internet Chinese encyclopaedia, the occasion’s deputy director is Li Kang, who's the co-founding father of Wang Jie’s Film Casting Culture.
Joy Dong, who runs the small Joy House Film Festival in Australia, was invited by way of e mail to be a part of World Film Fair’s occasion in 2018, at New York City’s Trump International Hotel & Tower, and flew all the best way to the US. At the competition, attendees might mingle with different filmmakers and watch films, however the organiser by no means confirmed up, Dong and one other attendee, filmmaker Jillie Simon, instructed the China Media Project. “It was weird,” Simon stated.
Taking honours dwelling
Whatever the intentions behind these festivals, and occasions like Eleni Vlassi’s IDFI, they bestowed honours on the four documentaries, all advancing Chinese state narratives, that have been central to their promotion. Through worldwide wire companies, press releases may very well be revealed about supposed movie competition successes for all four titles.
Spring, Seeing Hong Kong Again might declare, in its press launch, to have gained “Best Documentary” at the Prague Film Festival – the non-existent competition the place the earlier yr Lelièvre’s collaboration with Jin Huaqing, Ripples, had been the viewers favorite. In the identical manner, Splendid Land, with its whitewashing of life in Xinjiang, and Hong Kong, Please Shining Again might flaunt wins at IDFI or boast about a full competition circuit schedule.
It’s unclear which firm or corporations produced and funded these four films. One of the weblog posts about Splendid Land says it was made by Jin Huaqing Film Studio. Several of the press releases have been labelled as having been paid for by a firm referred to as Star International Culture and Media, which may very well be the unofficial English identify for a Chinese firm or may very well be fully fictitious. The Gmail addresses supplied together with the press releases don't exist.
Whoever in the end paid for the manufacturing of those four films, it appears they don't want to be discovered — mysterious behaviour in an business constructed on self-promotion. One attainable rationalization is that the entire level was that these pro-China films might merely do their magic abroad, whereas any affiliation with state entities and their propaganda goals remained backstage. This bid for believable deniability is definitely a side seen in other forms of Chinese state propaganda.
The trailer for Splendid Land seems to have been blocked in sure jurisdictions. Photo: Screenshot, by way of YouTube.
Puzzlingly, it’s troublesome to confirm the documentaries’ true viewers. Three of the four films have virtually no footprint on the Chinese web, and overseas audiences got little to no alternative to watch them. Perhaps, this was all a bureaucratic train by some nationwide or provincial-stage authorities workplace that had been instructed to do its half for China’s world picture constructing — and wanted fancy-sounding competition awards to present it had executed its job.
In many circumstances, the Chinese authorities companies conducting exterior propaganda, keen to publicise outcomes at dwelling, overtly declare cooperation or affiliation with overseas media or different organisations when the relationships concerned are purely business, corresponding to hiring public relations companies or renting occasion venues. Under comparable stress, state media should challenge annual “social responsibility reports” for which one metric is how they've performed “external communication.”
It could be one other instance of what has been criticised by some students in China as “the internalisation of exterior propaganda (外宣内宣化). This internalisation typically refers to the extremely nationalistic and even antagonistic tone of the federal government’s exterior propaganda, which performs to extra excessive home audiences whereas really alienating overseas ones.
Another side of this internalisation is the necessity for these finishing up exterior propaganda, together with authorities companies and movie manufacturing corporations, to promote their actions to crucial viewers of all: Party leaders at the highest, like Xi Jinping, who've enjoined them to exit and “tell China’s story well.”
Whatever the complete story behind the display, these films and their puzzling promotional supplies are clear examples of how Chinese makes an attempt to interact with the world may be clumsy affairs. Forgoing transparency to seem credible, they in the end obtain fully the other.
CMP Director David Bandurski contributed further analysis for this text.
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