Films showing unique insight into rural China receive UK premiere in Cambridge

The University of Cambridge and Cambridge Arts Picture House have collaborated to screen 10 ground-breaking documentaries about village life in China which, uniquely, have been made by the villagers themselves.

The short films are the results of the China Village Documentary Project, begun in 2005, which for the first time ever opened a visual channel with China’s rural communities by putting video and still cameras in the hands of locals.

They were asked to make films on the theme of the nationwide village self-governance programme. This policy, begun in the 1980s, gave the country’s villagers a level of democratic independence for the first time under Communist rule. People were allowed to elect their own officials and could decide how to divide up grants from central government. Commentators described it as a “quiet revolution”.

Dr Jane Nolan, from the University’s Faculty of Social and Political Sciences said: “These films are fascinating not only as a study of the self-governance programme, but also because of what they show us about life in China’s rural communities in general.

“A mixture of positive and negative messages comes through: while there seems to be evidence of corruption in some provinces, elsewhere we see places where government and society are functioning well at local level.”

The public and political life of China’s rural communities has never been captured through the eyes of local people in this way. The film-makers range in age from 24 to 59 and are a mix of men and women. They include farmers, a local barber, a village Communist party chairman and an ethnic Tibetan. Most had never even used a video camera before the project began.

The films will be shown at the Arts Picture House, on St Andrew’s Street, tonight at 6pm. Tomorrow, the project’s director Jian Yi, will be leading a discussion and reception about the films, hosted by the University of Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at 17, Mill Lane, Cambridge. This event will commence at 5pm.