Set in an isolated rural corner of Hebei province, Shattered examines the difficult relationship between Tang Xixin, an 80-year-old widowed former railroad worker and his adult daughter Tang Caifeng, a former prostitute and small-town brothel madame with business interests in prostitution and illegal mining.
Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London)
Shattered is the third in director Xu Tong's so-called 'Vagabonds' trilogy of documentaries made between 2008 and 2011 about unconventional people who live on the margins of society and often outside the law in northern China today. Wheat Harvest (2008) is an intimate portrait of a group of part-time and seasonal sex workers living and working in a rustic brothel on the rural fringe of Beijing, while Fortune Teller (2009) focusses on the lives of a poor, marginalised and dispossessed couple in small-town Hebei Province, a blind and partially crippled fortune teller and his deaf-mute wife, who have been largely rejected by their families and ignored by the able-bodied society, and who depend for their livelihood largely on the generosity of other poor, marginalised people, notably small-town sex workers.
The DirectorXu Tong (b. Beijing, 1965) majored in news photography at the Communications University of China before turning to documentary film-making. Now one of the best-known Chinese documentary film-makers outside China, Xu Tong describes himself as a 'nomad' or 'vagabond' film-maker, and Shattered, together with Wheat Harvest (2008) and Fortune Teller (2009), make up his so-called 'Vagabonds Trilogy' of documentaries about unconventional people who live on the margins of society and often outside the law in northern China today.
Xu Tong's work belongs very much to the Chinese version of the hand-held camera, direct observational school of documentary film-making, and several of his films, notably Wheat Harvest, have been severely criticised for grossly intruding on their subjects' privacy and for neglecting to observe the conventions usually employed to disguise their true identities. In much of his work, Xu Tong appears to sympathise or even empathise with the marginality and defiant nonconformity of many of his subjects, and his most recent work, Cut Out the Eyes, an epic ethnographic documentary about a highly unconventional, semi-delinquent blind nomadic musician in Inner Mongolia, follows very much in the same line.
Interview with Xu Tong:http://www.timeoutbeijing.com/features/Books__Film-Interviews__Features/143462/Interview-controversial-filmmaker-Xu-Tong.html
Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London) and Patrizia LIBERATI (Istituto di Cultura Italiana, Beijing)
Shortly before the Chinese New Year, reclusive, misanthropic former railway worker and nostalgic hardline Communist Tang Xixin is visited in turn by his adult children, with each of whom he quarrels. The only one who stays with him for any length of time is his daughter Tang Caifeng, a former prostitute and brothel madame who dreams of getting rich quickly by investing in an illegal mining operation in Hebei province. Xixin lives largely in the past, in the founding years of Chinese Communism before Deng Xiaoping's 'Reform era' opened the floodgates of state-sponsored capitalism, while his entrepreneurial daughter Caifeng, with her casual disregard for legality and workers' rights, seems to incarnate the spirit of the new China, with its obsessive pursuit of riches and self-aggrandisement at any cost. Yet beyond these stark contrasts and apparent generational and culture clashes, something seems to draw them together, almost in spite of themselves. Using extended first-person testimony to camera and fly-on-the-wall observational documentary cinematography, Xu Tong builds up a picture of the complex generational gaps, ideological clashes and cultural discontinuities characteristic of many modern Chinese families and of contemporary Chinese society as a whole, and in the process invites the audience to reflect on the future of the Chinese extended family and to ask how this increasingly fragmented society can possibly meet the human needs of those of its members who remain outside the charmed circles of the urban middle classes and the business and political elites.
Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London)
Xu Tong's work, including Shattered, belongs very much to the Chinese version of the direct observational school of documentary film-making, and several of his films, notably Wheat Harvest, have been severely criticised for grossly intruding on their subjects' privacy and for neglecting to observe the conventions usually employed to disguise their true identities, or else for failing to make any comment or criticism of their subjects' unethical or anti-social opinions and behaviour, as in the case of Shattered. However, this appears to be a deliberate choice on the documentarist's part in the interests of painting a 'true' picture of contemporary Chinese social realities as lived by marginal individuals who seldom feature in mainstream media reporting and whose often deviant experiences usually go unreported and unexpressed.
Dr. Michael CLARK (King's College London)
