Convo w/ Will Wu, Part 2: "Censorship is not an excuse to not produce good work"
#Issue 3 continues: the short doc filmmaker on censorship, inspiration, and what's behind the scene of two Arrow Factory videos
Hi there,
It’s Beimeng, Yan, and Charlotte. This is the fourth Far & Near, part two of a conversation with Guoji (Will) Wu, a documentary filmmaker based in Beijing who’s worked for Arrow Factory and Vice China.
In this issue, we go behind the scenes of two Will documentaries, one about a waste-sorting researcher taking on an impossible challenge in her hometown, and another on the dilemmas of teaching ballet in rural China. Key takeaways from our chat include how to make judgment calls when identifying protagonists, and what to do when the main narrative isn’t panning out as anticipated.
If you haven’t read Part One of this conversation, you can find it here. This interview has been translated and edited for brevity and clarity.
Doc #1: 垃圾村的改革者 “A Revolutionary Sweeps Through Trash Village”
Chen Liwen, a scholar on environmental issues who earned her degrees in North America, takes on an almost impossible challenge by educating villagers to sort their waste in her hometown in rural Hebei.
Doc #2: 芭蕾村的假期 “A Rural Ballet Vacation”
A rural art education experiment brings together young ballet dancers from Xiong'an New Area in Hebei and Hong Kong. The unlikely encounter reveals cruel realities: where the Hong Kongers can treat ballet as a hobby, the Hebei girls see ballet as a lifeline to a better future.
Beimeng: Tell me why you selected these two videos for us to discuss.
Will: They are typical subjects I would be interested in and the stories are more-or-less tragic in nature, which is attractive to me. I first met Chen Liwen, the protagonist of the waste sorting film, in 2015. Back then, I was a student at the International Multimedia Journalism program working on a school assignment. In 2018 she was going to try and implement garbage sorting in her home village in Cangzhou, Hebei. At that time, even Beijing and Shanghai hadn't issued directives on garbage sorting, and here she wanted to do it in a village. Many academics influence society by convincing decision-makers. But Chen is quite different — she practices what she preaches among ordinary folk. She wants to use her academic background to push things forward.
The big question for me was whether I’d be able to craft a story out of it. Was it going to be an ordinary and uneventful narrative—each family is given a garbage can and everyone just starts recycling? What kind of person was Chen four years after I first met her; what circumstances was she in now? I also worried that Chen’s personality was too scholarly and hard to draw emotion out of.
I went to the village with a photographer for a day and used this trip to decide whether I’d come back. On that day, some details drew our attention.
Chen has a deep attachment to her hometown. We listened to her as she talked about how waste is dealt with in rural areas — burned and buried in the soil; no one cares about the land. She left her hometown at a young age and spent many years in the U.S. Her adult life had been far away from her childhood environment, but she hadn't forgotten the local dialect and was, in fact, very willing to speak it. She still liked the northern Hebi countryside food and would pick up fallen dates on the ground to eat. I didn’t see any possibility for “conflict” in the narrative yet, but many details made me feel that she was real, genuine. So I decided to come back a week later to produce the story.
B: Why did you say you are attracted to tragic stories?
W: There’s a quote from Hegel that I am paraphrasing: “the best battle is between justice and righteousness.” It is not the battle between good and evil, or evil and evil. It’s two things that are both right fighting each other. It’s simply because we value things differently as we’re all different, with unique logics and points of view. Chen’s project in her village failed. After she left, the system collapsed. She also went to villages in Jiangxi and Zhejiang with similar attempts. Some succeeded, some failed. The tragic character is doing the right thing, but we can’t say the society is wrong either. The two just can’t be integrated yet. For her, the failure didn’t matter.
B: Let’s talk about the Xiong’an ballet school doc. The storyline is quite interesting — it’s not just about a rural ballet project, but also about the presence of students from Hong Kong that creates an interesting contrast with local participants. It's the exchanges between them that really raise the complexity and dimensions of the story. How did you design it?
W: Originally I’d structured the story to solely be about the interaction between Hong Kong kids and mainland kids, whether these two cohorts would become friends or not. What actually happened was that they couldn't really build a strong connection because of cultural and language differences. We shot for five days there and on the third night, we had drinks with the instructor from the Hong Kong ballet school. At that point, we were still wondering how we could capture more “dramatic” interactions between the kids for our video. But the instructor told us a lot of things he’d observed in Duan village — what it was like at home for the mainland kids, and the unscientific training methods [parents] used which could have a permanent negative impact on the kids’ bodies. This opened up a new idea for us. There’s an obsession rooted in families whose kids dance ballet, and this teacher understood it as someone from Hunan whose life had been completely transformed by ballet. After that conversation, we had some new ideas for this story.
B: Did you start sorting out the footage when you came back from the shoot, or did you start adjusting the direction right there after the interview?
W: We adjusted the direction on the fourth and fifth day, and the shoot went very smoothly with the new direction. We did go back to the village for additional interviews. It took 6 days in the field. I edited the video myself, which took about 10 days.
B: Arrow Factory’s content has become “softer” lately. Does it have anything to do with pervasive censorship?
W: I think some people might say that, but I've never felt that way. Although everything in this country has to be approved by the censors, we as creators can't take this as an excuse to not produce good work.
B: So you haven't had any stories shot down by the censors?
W: Very few, probably less than 5% of all the work we’ve produced. Even if they’d passed censorship and been released, I doubt they’d be masterpieces. They may be just another average film. I don't think it's like what you or many other people imagine, that this external environment prevents us from producing good work. I honestly think we need to reflect more on our own practice.
B: Where do you get your inspiration from?
W: Before our interview, I just finished reading a French graphic novel called Once Upon a Time in France by Fabien Nury. I find that Japanese manga, American graphic novels, and European graphic novels are all very different in terms of their narrative style, even though they use the same storytelling medium.
I really like Italo Calvino. I am influenced by his writing style, and the imagination in his work—you can interpret it as nonsense or whatever. He makes me look anew at the world around me by taking a step back.
Who we are:
Yan Cong is a Beijing-based freelance photographer and documentary film producer. She sometimes writes about internet culture for Chaoyang Trap.
Beimeng Fu is a video journalist based between Beijing and Shanghai. She is a lover of language and documentary.
Ye Charlotte Ming is a journalist and photo editor covering stories about culture, history, and identity. She’s based in Berlin.
Interviewer: Beimeng Fu; Translator: Yan Cong and Ye Charlotte Ming
Copy Editor: Krish Raghav