The Young Fool Who Made a Film: Profile of the Director of Yugong Yishan Documentary

Yugong Yishan is one of the best live music venues in town. It's won the Best Live Music gong at the Beijinger's Readers Bar and Club Awards every year for the past 5 years and this week Kaiser Kuo told Beijing Boyce that he considers the new digs on Zhang Zizhong Lu to be one of the 5 best Beijing live music venues of all time. Where else can you see a French trip-hop DJ on Friday night, then on the next night catch a raucous blues show and then on the following day go and watch Peking Opera with the local Peking Opera society? On Friday night they'll be screening a 30 minute documentary about themselves by director Joanna Vasquez Arong. Steven Schwankert caught up with the director of the film last month and we've included his profile of the director below.

Joanna Vasquez Arong may not necessarily be a citizen of the world, but she certainly has lived all over it. Although the full-time documentary filmmaker has been a Beijinger since 2002, her previous addresses took her from her native Cebu in the Philippines to the United States, first for high school and then for a degree at Boston College – with a side trip of a year in Paris. Another move sent her to U.K. for a master’s at the London School of Economics, before a career in finance and economic development sent her back to the U.S. and then Bangkok, Thailand.

In 2002 she arrived in Beijing and enrolled at the Beijing Film Academy, both to study Chinese language and filmmaking. The onset of SARS in the spring of 2003 presented the opportunity for her first full-length film, Neo Lounge, about the now-defunct club south of the Canadian embassy, where she whiled away her evenings as the epidemic brought the city to a standstill.

Neo Lounge follows the lives of three Beijing residents, two foreigners and one Chinese, during that period and shortly after. It was the spirit of those people – and ultimately, the Beijing itself – that inspired the film. “Things here are in constant motion. There’s still a feeling you can do anything. People here look forward,” Arong said.

The fate of the bar itself is also represent of life in the capital. “Things are destroyed, things don’t work out, but oh, ok, we’re still moving forward,” she said.

Although Neo Lounge was ultimately torn down, Arong and her film fared better, earning her three awards, including best documentary at the 34th Brussels Independent Film Festival in 2007.

For her latest film, The Old Fool Who Moved the Mountains, a Beijing nightlife venue once again plays the starring role. The film’s Chinese title will be more familiar to those familiar with Beijing’s music scene: Yugong Yishan.

The Chinese folk tale of the same name tells the story of an old man who decides that a mountain near his home is blocking the way of travelers, who must detour around it. Each day, he goes out and digs, moving shovel by shovel towards his goal. His wife and neighbors ridicule him, but he persists, confident that if he does not finish before he dies, his sons, grandsons and further generations will carry on his work in a classic story of perseverance.

Arong said she saw that spirit in the man behind Beijing’s Yugong Yishan, Lu Zhigang, a.k.a. Gouzi. “As soon as I met him, I thought, ‘I’m going to do a film on this.’”

Despite it being centered on a music venue and featuring three Beijing-based bands – Hanggai, the Beijing Live Hip-Hop Experience, and Ling Yi (Voodoo Kungfu), she doesn’t see it in the same vein as early Beijing rock films, like Zhang Yuan’s 1992 quasi-documentary Beijing Bastards. “I’m really not doing a film about music, I’m doing a film about the spirit of the music and the people who make it,” Arong said.

The film debuted at the Pusan International Film Festival – arguably Asia’s most important film confab – in October, and was also funded in part by a grant from the fest’s Asian Film Academy program.

Despite the similarity to Neo Lounge, Arong was not looking for another bar as subject matter. “Maybe it has something to do with the venue, but it’s the people I met there and the ambience I feel when I’m there,” she said.

Working in high-definition presented a new set of challenges. Unlike earlier standard cameras, HD video is stored only on hard drives. “With no tape, shots can and should go longer,” Arong said, although that requires more work during the editing process. It also requires more light – not always easy when shooting in the darker surroundings of a music venue like Yugong Yishan.

Arong’s next project will take her between two Asian capitals, Beijing and Bangkok. This time her subject has nothing to do with bars or life after dark. Instead, she has chosen to focus on the story of Zhou Enlai’s Thai “daughter,” Sirin Phathanothai.

In 1956, Sirin and her brother were sent to live in Beijing under the care of Premier Zhou, in an effort by her father – then Thailand’s prime minister – to improve relations with China. She did not return to her home country for 14 years, moving in China’s inner political circles in the depths of the Cultural Revolution. She continues to spend significant periods of time in Beijing.

Arong plans to begin filming in January, and will make use of archival material, adding an extra challenge: funding. But like a true artist, she’s having a hard time putting funding first. “I just want to make the film, rather than waiting for the money to come through,” she said.

Dec 19
Documentary: Yugong Yishan - The Man Who Moved the Mountain
Performances from Voodoo Kungfu (Lingyi), Hanggai, The Beijing Live Hip-hop Experience follow the documentary screening. Free.

9pm. Yugong Yishan (8402 8477)

Links and Sources
Yugongyishan.ning.com: THE OLD FOOL WHO MOVED THE MOUNTAINS 纪录片《愚公移山》
Youtube: Yugong Yishan (The Old Fool Who Moved the Mountains) Trailer
Youtube: Neo-Lounge Trailer
The Beijinger: Moving the Mountain