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Fallen City
12/22/2012 by Neil Young

The Bottom Line
Straightforwardly sensitive study of post-trauma grief steadily expands into a sly microcosm of the changes afoot in 21st-century China.

Chinese writer-director-producer Qi Zhao’s debut, selected for Sundance’s International Documentary Competition, follows the aftermath of a shattering 2008 earthquake.

The reconstruction of an earthquake-leveled town takes on intriguing allegorical aspects in Qi Zhao’s dutiful but deft documentary Fallen City. One of the more notable world premieres at Amsterdam’s IDFA, whose own Bertha Fund contributed to its production, it’s secured a North American bow as part of the International Documentary Competition at Sundance in January. This will doubtless lead to exposure at numerous non-fiction showcases through 2013, with small-screen sales a given.

Beijing-based writer-director Qi also acts as his own producer here, a role he filled on Lixin Fan’s well-traveled 2009 documentary Last Train Home. That film showed how a specific phenomenon could with proper handling speak volumes about general problems facing contemporary, fast-changing China. Lixin in turn takes an executive producer credit here, alongside U.K.-born Michelle Ho and prominent Canadian documentarian Peter Wintonick.

Already the focus of several documentaries and fictional treatments, the quake of May 12, 2008 was China’s deadliest for more than three decades, killing nearly 70,000 people in Sichuan province in the country’s mid-west. Among the communities devastated by the temblor was Beichuan, a town of 20,000 residents which was virtually wiped off the map in a matter of minutes.

Qi catches up with several of the survivors, following three stories over the course of four years: teenager Hong, who lost his father in the disaster; thirtysomething couple the Pengs, whose 11-year-old daughter was among the fatalities; and fortyish divorcee Mrs. Li who cares for her paralyzed mother in between rehousing her fellow townsfolk in her job as a community organizer.

The approach is suitably somber and respectful, each of the participants given time and space to verbalize their grief and explain how they go about picking up the pieces. This is absorbingly tough material, conventionally presented by means of talking-head testimony amid surveys of the wrecked landscape, with mournful musical accompaniment courtesy of the inevitable tinkling piano and sonorous strings.

But as Fallen City goes on, Qi does move toward establishing his own distinctive voice. From the very first shot - what looks like a leaf, but turns out to be a gentle mantis - he displays a Malick-esque fascination with flora and fauna, putting human suffering in the context of a natural world whose delicate fragility is more resilient than it might first appear. Cats and dogs play their part, but it’s those mantises which really steal the show, photogenic little critters whose gracefully jointed limbs encourage anthropomorphic speculation.

These grace-notes punctuate a wider narrative development in which Qi and his three editors devote considerable time to how the famously controlling Chinese government uses the crisis of Beichuan as an opportunity to start afresh. The stoically fatalistic residents are housed in temporary accommodation some 40 miles from home while a gleaming new city takes shape, with striking alacrity, in their absence.

The boosterish tones of officialdom become a wry running feature: “The new Beichuan will be a safe, beautiful and culturally rich city,” assures a spokesperson on state television. And once the modern, rigidly right-angled buildings and roads are constructed, the broadcasters crow: “We have made progress because we have a great party and a powerful country.”

Unsurprisingly, Qi and company find the reality to be more complex and problematic: complaints are heard that the new apartments are too expensive to rent or buy, and that the new city has “no feeling.” The supposed servants of the people emerge as less than entirely altruistic, notably in a third-act twist concerning one of the main protagonists which knocks the unsuspecting viewer off-balance.

Corruption, the discontents of youth, inter-generational strife, shortages of cash and the harsh effects of a tough labor-market all come under the microscope in a documentary which occasionally feels like it’s trying to cover too many aspects of 21st-century China within the confines of a standard 90-minute running-time. As a quiet paean to human resourcefulness and resilience in the worst of circumstances, however, Fallen City takes its place among a rich current run of east Asian documentaries that find illumination amid heart-rending desolation.

Venue: IDFA - International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (First Appearance Competition), November 21, 2012.

Production company: YFM (YuanFang Media)
Director / Screenwriter / Producer: Qi Zhao
Executive producers: Lixin Fan, Michelle Ho, Peter Wintonick
Directors of photography: Shaogang Sun, Xiaoyu Niu
Editors: Matthieu Laclau, Peicong Meng, Xiaoyo Niu

Sales agent: YFM, Beijing
No MPAA rating, 89 minutes
THR

Fallen City
(Documentary - China)
Dec. 12, 2012
By LESLIE FELPERIN

A YFM presentation of a YuanFang Media production in association with Ikon, in co-production with ITVS Intl., NHK, with the support of the Sundance Documentary Film Program, the IDFA Fund, NRK, Knowledge Network, YLE. (International sales: YuanFang Media.) Produced by Zhao Qi. Executive producers, Fan Lixin, Michelle Ho, Peter Wintonick. Directed, written by Zhao Qi.

With: Peng Xiaoguan, Li Xiaorong, Hong Shihao, Niu Rong, Li Guihua, Li Shanming. (Sichuan dialogue)

Three families from the decimated Chinese city of Beichuan who lost loved ones in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake struggle to cope with more than just the emotional aftermath in Zhao Qi’s absorbing docu “Fallen City.” Strictly as a depiction of ordinary people working through grief after horrific loss, the pic is expectedly moving, if nothing radically new, but it gets much more interesting when its focus expands to encompass broader issues about the protagonists’ lives. Selected to compete at Sundance after its IDFA premiere, Zhao’s debut could build limited theatrical prospects, but will be most at home on upscale TV.

The magnitude 8.0 quake killed nearly 70,000 people in Sichuan province, and reduced the city of Beichuan to splinters in a matter of minutes. Quickly spliced-in news footage, shot immediately after the quake, captures wailing survivors digging bodies out of the rubble, and underscores the scale of the disaster. Quieter and more effective, however, is the elegiac original material showing what’s left of the town now, where shattered buildings are ornamented by flowers and makeshift shrines, still-standing walls bear traces of lives erased, and abandoned cats and dogs roam free, indifferent to the loss of human life.

After a montage of static cinematic “portraits” of survivors holding pictures of the dead, the narrative zeroes in on three main families: Peng Xiaoguan and his wife, Li Xiaorong, who lost their only child, an 11-year-old girl; 14-year-old Hong Shihao, who lost his father; and middle-aged community leader Li Guihua, who lost three sisters, a daughter and a granddaughter, leaving her alone to look after her dementia-afflicted mother.

What makes “Fallen City” more compelling than most documentaries of its kind is its emphasis on how its subjects grapple with the challenges of life still to be lived. Peng and Li face hard choices about their future, such as whether they want to have another child, and if Li should take a lucrative job offer in Shanghai. Hong would much rather drown out his sorrows by playing online games, but his ferocious tiger mother, who’s already remarried and is reconciled to the loss of her first husband, hectors him constantly about his poor grades. Li Guihua throws herself into her work,and caring for her own mother, but a shocking reveal late in the game will force auds to rethink their position on this seemingly noble, Mother Courage-like figure.

All the while, Zhao, who produced the fine and thematically similar docu “Last Train Home,” is careful not to directly criticize the Chinese government for how the tragedy was handled or, perish the thought, lay any of the blame on possibly substandard housing. Nevertheless, there’s a faint but unmistakable note of irony in the occasional cutaways to news reports touting the swift rebuilding of a new Beichuan city, emphasizing in classic Socialist style the physical scale of the project, the number of residential units created and the supposed advantages of the new location.

Tech contributions are highly polished, especially the HD lensing by Sun Shaoguang. The soundtrack, featuring tunes by composer Arvo Part, including the overused “Spiegel im Spiegel,” is at least sparsely deployed.

Camera (color, widescreen, HD), Sun Shaoguang; editor, Matthieu Laclau, Meng Peicong; sound (DTS/SDDS/Dolby Digital), Fan Liming; sound designer, Meng Peicong. Reviewed online, London, Dec. 7, 2012. (In Intl. Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam — First Appearance; 2013 Sundance Film Festival — World Cinema, competing.) Running time: 88 MIN.
Variety