【the new york】We Are All Melbournian

忧心

We Are All Melbournian
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2009/07/we-are-all-melbournian.html

According to the Melbourne newspaper The Age, Chinese hackers protesting the Melbourne International Film Festival’s screenings of the Australian director Jeff Daniels’s documentary “10 Conditions of Love,” about the exiled Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer (who will be on hand), attacked the festival’s Web site: they “replaced festival information with the Chinese flag and anti-Kadeer slogans and were [Saturday] night continuing to disrupt the site by spamming.”

Evan Osnos reported on his New Yorker blog about the withdrawals of Chinese films and filmmakers (in particular, the great director Jia Zhangke, whom Evan recently profiled in the magazine) from the festival in response to the planned screening; as the controversy mounts, film festivals of the world should be trembling—and uniting. Films critical of governments are a staple of the cinema, and of film festivals. At this moment, the world’s film-festival organizers should be uniting in defense of the right to program without fear films they deem worthwhile.

It’s important to remember that China heavily censors the Internet—and that e-mail messages hostile to Kadeer, “10 Conditions,” and the festival screening are allowed to be sent, while any in favor of the film certainly couldn’t get through from China to the Melbourne Festival. Therefore the hack attack should be understood as the tacit work of the Chinese government, and film festivals shouldn’t stand for it. “10 Conditions of Love” (which I haven’t seen) should be instantly programmed by all upcoming festivals; I’d like to see it included in the Toronto International Film Festival, in September, in its important documentary section; in the New York Film Festival, coming in October; in Venice, Sundance, Berlin, Rotterdam, Cannes—all the festivals that matter in the industry should show Daniels’s film. Festival directors would thereby affirm their solidarity with the Melbourne Festival and with its courageous director, Richard Moore, against government pressure.

And what if, in response, China should keep its films and filmmakers out of these same festivals? Then the films would become, in effect, samizdat (and would end up being seen, eventually, as such)—and China would no longer be able to make use of these films’ release to international festivals as a form of advertising for an ambiguous and tenuous policy of tolerance (which Evan reported on recently in the magazine)—or, rather, as an international cosmetic covering for repressive practices at home.

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