QUIET AND HUMANE WORK
Doc a moving portrait of modern China built on the memories of various writers
I put the blame squarely on myself for not enjoying Zhangke Jia's Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue more than I did. The documentary, set in an author's festival in the director's home province of Shanxi, China, interviews three modern writers born in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, as well as the daughter of the late writer-activist Ma Feng.
What emerges over 18 brief chapters is a portrait of modern China since 1949, refracted through the very personal memories of creative types who lived through the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution and the years that followed.
It's a huge chasm, those 70 years. In fact, you don't even have to go back that far. In the chapter The Old and the New we see Jia's hometown of Fenyang in 1997, an image of people hand-sweeping an empty dirt road that looks like something from the 19th century. Today, it's a bustling city, full of cars and buses.
So why was I underwhelmed? Lack of cultural context. Jia didn't make this movie specifically for outsiders, so references to KMT (the nationalist Kuomintang party) or the Gang of Four (a '60s political faction) are not deeply explained.
That said, there's much here that is universal.
Take the story of Yu Hua, who was born in 1960, and became a writer after working unhappily as a dentist for five years. His method of getting published is both artful and hilarious; as he tells it, he would send his work off to literary journals. Each time the rejection letter came back he'd send it out again, to a less prestigious outlet, until someone finally agreed to publish him. Today, his work has been translated into more than 40 languages and won numerous international awards.
There's much more besides in this quiet, humane work. If you go in with a modicum of modern Chinese historical knowledge already in your pocket, even greater riches await.