Movie shines light on peasant-turned-painter and his fake Van Goghs
BEIJING: One of the most affecting moments in China’s Van Goghs unfolds in a small art gallery, where the documentary’s protagonists and their friends eagerly gather to watch the 1956 Vincent van Gogh biopic Lust for Life.
Their excitement soon turns to dismay when they take in the Dutch painter’s struggles; and by the time director Vincente Minnelli and star Kirk Douglas reach Van Gogh’s suicide in the fi nal scenes, there are shaking heads and moist eyes all around.
The poignant part is that the audience is not composed of your average cosmopolitan art fi lm buffs: These are working- class men who earn a living producing copies of Van Gogh’s paintings in workshops in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
A beautifully shot, wellstructured and moving story about art, work and the human spirit, the fi lm should have a good shot at niche release, with ancillary action to follow.
After bowing at IDFA in Amsterdam, Yu Haibo and Kiki Tianqi Yu have subsequently toured European and North American festivals before returning home with shows at Beijing and Xining’s First International Film Festival.
China’s Van Goghs doesn’t simply dwell on the differences between these 21st- century Chinese workers and the 19thcentury Dutch maestro; its insight is that they are kindred spirits separated merely by time, geography and social class.
Veering sharply away from the stereotype of Chinese labourers as a faceless mass seeking a better quality of life, China’s Van Goghs explores their desire for spiritual fulfi lment, too.
True, the beginning of the fi lm could pass for a straightforward account of how these self-learned painters run fairly small family operations that have produced hundreds of thousands of cheap Van Gogh replicas over the past three decades.
But slowly, the fi lmmakers show their protagonists as bona fide artists, struggling like Van Gogh to fi nd their creative voices and realise their vision beyond their own economic and social circumstances.