Transcriber: Wang Wei Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg
Good evening.
It’s a great pleasure to be here.
Thank you for coming.
Tonight, I’m going to tell you the story of four films
that I have directed here in China in the recent past.
Really, the story is about how these films changed my mind,
first about China,
and how they changed the course of my career.
Believe it or not, I’m really not this old,
but I did come to China in 1981
as a very young filmmaker when I first came here,
and I traveled around your country for months.
And what I saw back in 1981 was a country
that was still struggling with the ravages of poverty,
the kind of poverty that we in Europe and in North America
hadn’t really seen since the Industrial Revolution.
It was a shock for me.
And it was an even bigger shock to return to China to see
what you guys had achieved
in the 30 years of my absence.
I spent 30 years making films around the world.
I came back in 2013 to make a film called Better Angels.
And it was a film
that was about the future of the relationship
between the United States and China.
You remember in what they called the aughts, the 2000s,
there was a lot of talk about the kind of vigorous competition
between China and America on many subjects:
on global influence, on the access to natural resources,
on technical preeminence.
All those questions were very much in play.
Yet back then, both countries acknowledged that they needed each other.
They were mutually dependent.
So in retrospect, I don’t think we were completely crazy
to think that we could make a film about a future
that was more about cooperation than confrontation.
We finished our film in 2019.
It took a long time to get it done.
By the time we finished it,
it was kind of a strange, sprawling,
optimistic counter-narrative
to everything that people were talking about with regard to China.
It was a really hard time for us
because the critical and political headwinds we faced
were fierce.
There was very little discussion actually about content,
but there was a lot of discussion about intent.
I learned a huge amount about China during those four years.
And I came out of the experience far more enlightened
about the true nature of this remarkable country and its people.
The truth is few Americans, few Western Europeans,
few people outside China really understand what China is today.
Not to mention what it was 5000 years ago.
More importantly, what it’s likely to be in the future.
China is an enigma.
It’s a mystery.
And frequently, when we don’t understand something,
we tend, unfortunately, we tend to fear it.
So that's why I decided to stay here in China.
I saw an opportunity to tell Chinese stories to a wider world.
I guess my ambition, my desire is that the films that we make
could in some way act as a bridge between two cultures,
let other people around the world see what I have seen
and what I have kind of come to understand
about this amazing country.
But after four years of travelling around China,
making this film and also going abroad extensively to see
how Chinese abroad are engaging with the rest of the world,
I think I’ve drawn some conclusions and maybe learned a few lessons -
those are what I tried to put into Better Angels.
One of the things I learned
was that Chinese people kind of exist
definitely with the sense of their past greatness,
also of a very bitter sense
of the couple of centuries of humiliation,
colonial humiliation.
Then there’s what you’re doing today,
because China and Chinese people have a real sense
of the extraordinary changes that are happening,
the achievements that China has come to in the last 30, 40 years.
The 21st century is going to be China’s century,
of that I have absolutely no doubt.
And the renaissance of your country is both relentless,
and it’s inevitable.
China’s restoration
as one of the preeminent civilizations on the planet
is already well underway.
A French poet that I admire enormously, a man called Charles Baudelaire,
who invented the concept in his literature of the flâneur, the wanderer,
Baudelaire wrote of his joy
at setting up house in the heart of the multitude,
of being away from home and yet at home everywhere,
and seeing the world
and yet remaining hidden from the world.
Now, what Baudelaire was doing when he described the flâneur
was effectively describing the job description
of every documentary filmmaker who was going to come after him,
because that’s exactly what I do,
and everybody in this trade does every day.
So it was that I decided
that China would be the next world that I’d explore,
and that my multitude would be the Chinese people.
My Chinese producer, Han Yi, who I’ve worked with since 2013,
we were busy, we were doing press and publicity for the Better Angels film
when news broke out of huge protests
that were happening on the streets of Hong Kong.
Suddenly China was very much in the crosshairs,
and the Western press were pouring into Hong Kong to cover the story.
So we went back and even in those early days,
I found it odd that the news coverage
that I was seeing every day, coming out of Hong Kong,
seemed to like depth and substance.
What they were doing was kind of an easy to digest confection
of stories about heroic student protesters yearning for democracy,
and, you know, taking on the evil Chinese superstate.
It wasn’t difficult to sell that to a Western audience.
If only it had been true, which it wasn’t.
The problem was that from our experience,
that narrative only had a glancing relationship with the truth.
It was a carefully curated, selectively edited groupthink.
And from our perspective,
and we were on the streets pretty much every day
with the tear gas, with the pepper spray, with the petrol bombs
that were being kind of thrown around by both sides in the conflict.
There was a huge amount that wasn’t being reported.
So our intention, which was to objectively memorialize what was happening
without bias for either side,
was casting us like voices in the wilderness,
because we were very much in the minority telling that story.
Shortly after we were in Hong Kong,
rumors began to circulate about another huge story:
a Chinese city under siege
because of a virulent and deadly virus.
At that time,
it was very difficult to get into Wuhan.
And both Han Yi and I knew that that was going to be the big story
for the foreseeable future.
The moment the Chinese government
made the tough and politically risky decision
to lock down a city of 11 million people,
the Western press corps howled, condemning the measures.
They called it draconian.
And yet in hindsight,
what China did was common sense,
and the simple expedient of denying the virus hosts
so that it could not thrive and it could not spread,
proved to be both obvious and extraordinarily effective.
My team and I witnessed
tremendous heroism in Wuhan.
We saw fortitude and bravery
and just these extraordinary scenes of 42,000 doctors and nurses,
many of them very, very young, your age,
and also another 40,000 construction workers.
All those people descended on Wuhan in a matter of days.
And we were there through it all,
watching these people endure the lockdown,
watching the citizens of Wuhan,
who I’m sure were not happy to be locked down.
But because they trusted the government
and because their government trusted their scientists,
we were able to, after just 76 days,
be there when the lockdown was lifted, and the celebrations happened.
It was an extraordinary moment.
What we witnessed during those months of shooting
was, for all of us, profoundly moving.
We saw the best of the Chinese people.
And in the film that we made,
we tried to tell their stories honestly and without bias.
My only regret from that experience is that still today,
far too few people,
in China to some extent, but abroad, to a great extent,
know the truth of China’s achievement.
And if only people could have seen what we saw in Wuhan on a daily basis:
not only the heroism of young, inexperienced doctors and nurses,
but also their fear and confusion,
and through it all,
the dedication to meet head on and beat a deadly challenge.
Now, I don’t delude myself
that the work we’re going to do is going to change the world.
But someone has to try and cover these big stories.
And if you’re going to cover them, you have to cover them honestly
in a fair and balanced way.
That’s the reason that I chose for my last film.
Actually, it wasn’t a film.
It was four short films called A Long Cherry Stream.
I got very interested in this kind of initiative in China
called “xiaokang,” poverty alleviation,
something which has happened over the last few years in China,
has been barely even noticed in the West,
but it’s an extraordinary success.
Since 1949, China has lifted 650 million people out of poverty.
That is extraordinary.
It’s amazing and it’s laudable.
I checked the numbers, and in my lifetime,
China’s delivered the biggest improvement in living standards
to the largest number of people in the fastest time in history.
Not bad.
But by 2010, it wasn’t enough,
because there was still 100 million people living in abject poverty
mostly in the West, in rural areas,
but in pockets all over the country.
Today, I’m glad to say that’s no longer the case.
During the past few years, anyone living in extreme poverty in China
was offered the opportunity of a lifetime.
That would be relocated from their remote rural communities.
They’d be able to leave
the kind of extremely harsh economic circumstances they were living in
and move to newly built communities
where they would be given a place to live,
hospitalization, and education for their kids,
job creation so that they could learn to fend for themselves
and look after themselves.
We tracked those people
that had been given a huge lifeline after living a life of abject poverty.
They took the opportunity, which required a huge amount of bravery.
I don't think I could do it.
It was a very emotional series.
But for a filmmaker, there’s nothing quite as satisfying
as being able to make a film with a happy ending.
And this series showed
that people with nothing left to hope for
were suddenly given the freedom to dream.
There’s 100 million people newly liberated,
joining society with all their energy, their optimism, their enthusiasm
and their will to succeed.
All those people came online, if you will, on stream
to join the Chinese community.
And this happened in less than a decade.
A Long Cherished Dream was a series that showed what could happen
when the political will existed to make it happen.
Now, I’ll conclude by saying that my hope for myself
is that I can continue to be what Baudelaire called a flâneur,
an unbiased observer showing the world how Chinese people confront
and embrace these huge changes that are happening
while struggling to live more meaningful and productive lives.
Although the drums may roll, and the dogs may bark,
the caravan that is China,
I think, will still proceed and progress and move on successfully.
Because from everything I’ve seen
during the time I’ve spent in your country,
there’s nothing to match it.
And quite honestly, there’s nothing to catch it.
Thank you.
(Applause)