‘Little by little, the truth is being discovered’: the archive rescuing China’s forbidden films
On the wall of an unassuming secondfloor room in Newcastle University sits a map, Blu-Tacked, unframed. At first glance it looks like any other map of China. But on closer inspection, the cities labelled on the map are not just the major urban centres. They are the places that have hosted important film festivals over the years, the details of which are annotated in colour-coded text.
Covering the final years of the socalled golden era of the scene, the map shows dozens of film festivals that used to be active across China. There was the China Independent Film Festival (Ciff ) in Nanjing, the Beijing Independent Film Festival (Biff), and the Yunnan Multiculture Visual Festival (Yunfest), among others. In 2024, China’s film community is a shadow of its former self. All these festivals – and more than a dozen others – have been forced to close in the years after Xi Jinping, China’s ultra-repressive leader, took office in 2012.
And so it is that an archive containing nearly 800 indie films and oral interviews with more than 100 filmmakers came to be preserved around 5,000 miles away from Beijing. Newcastle’s Chinese Independent Film Archive (Cifa), which opened in September 2023, is the world’s largest publicly accessible archive of independent Chinese
films. It is also “the first of its kind outside China that is housed at a university and is accessible”, says Karin Chien, a film producer and the co-founder of dGenerate Films, a distributor of Chinese indie cinema.
The archive is the brainchild of Sabrina Qiong Yu, a film and Chinese studies professor at Newcastle University. The idea came about after she organised a 10th anniversary event for Ciff in Newcastle in 2014. Ciff had started in 2003, and was one of the major independent film festivals to flourish in the years when cheap, digital equipment started to become widely available, empowering indie film-makers in a period of relative openness in the country.
China’s mainstream media has always been subject to strict censorship, including the distribution of films in official cinemas. (In order to be released in China, films must obtain a longbiao,or “dragon seal” from the government-controlled China Film Administration.) A few months after Yu held the Ciff event in Newcastle, its close namesake Biff was forced to close down for good, and its whole archive was seized by the authorities. With no distribution, no festivals and no archive, the indie film movement looked at risk of fading into the past.
After winning a £1m grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council,Yu made several trips to China during the Covid-19 pandemic to collect the materials and interview filmmakers about their work. The centre launched in September last year with a two-week programme of events that