Coming to LA’s Downtown Independent and Chicago’s Facets Cinematheque this Friday, April 19 and to NYC’s Cinema Village on Friday, May 3: UNMADE IN CHINA
Tanner King Barklow and Gil Kofman’s misadventures in Chinese filmmaking made its debut at the Sydney Underground Film Festival, where it took home an award for best doc. It received another award at Edmonton, and has played a handful of other fests since, including St Louis and Sun Valley.
American indie film director Kofman is hired by Chinese producers to adapt and direct one of his screenplays, CASE SENSITIVE, for a Chinese audience. Although he is able to use some of his own team, the majority of the crew is Chinese, and, as he finds out, his backers aren’t exactly hands off. When Barklow learned about the project, he followed along, documenting the making of the film, and, as Kofman notes at the doc’s beginning, its unmaking. Adapting the old adage that films are made three times, in the writing, the shooting, and the editing, Barklow and Kofman bemusedly demonstrate how each of these facets are undermined during their China experience – scripts are rewritten by an overzealous and distrustful translator, without informing the director; equipment is sold by the crew for a quick buck; a passionate DP is fired for being too demanding, against Kofman’s wishes; the director’s edit is recut to produce an indecipherable narrative; and contract agreements are ignored, leading to non-stop work, headaches, and unpaid salaries. Films about the making of films, and especially behind-the-scene docs about disastrous projects, are nothing new – it’s a subgenre in itself – and, in many ways, Barklow and Kofman’s film follows the expected trajectory to provide an audience with the appropriate mixture of gleeful schadenfreude and genuine sympathy. What is different here is the Communist Chinese context and the smart decision to highlight the absurdity of the situation rather than a misplaced sense of righteous outrage. Not enough of CASE SENSITIVE is shown for the viewer to really make an absolute judgement on its artistic merit, but one suspects it was probably never going to be an Oscar contender anyway. Given this, the film isn’t about how the Chinese system ruined a would-be masterpiece, but more about how the corruption unmade the American filmmakers’ expectations of how films should be made. As such, it provides a funny, engaging, and simultaneously insider and outsider look at the compromises placed on creativity and art in a traditionally controlling system that is awkwardly flirting with at least the pretense of more openness.
what (not) to doc 