Storm under the Sun: Q&A with Dr. Louisa Wei

Moderator: Introducing Louisa Wei, the filmmaker

Louisa: I want to introduce my music composer Robert [Ellis-Geiger], who is here. (Applause) he did Johnny To's "election II' and there was one piece that Johnny to thought was too 'Chinese" and I thought, "I like it", so that sort of set the tone for the music. In here, we figure that, you know, a gangster movie and a political documentary can share the same spirit and music. Also, Max [Willis] is here, and he created all the animations for the poetry recited in the movie. (applause, translation)

Moderator: You can ask your question in any language...English, Mandarin, Cantonese

Audience: Are you planning to distribute your movie in mainland China?

(Laughter)

Louisa: This is a good question. It may not be able to show in public in mainland China. But you know, I think we will eventually just secretly move it into China because the Chinese audience, we tested a small number of them, were all overwhelmed. They all loved to see something like this.

Audience: What difficulties during making the movie [did you experience]?

Louisa: The difficulties was basically what happened in China, has lot of people involved in it. So we needed to figure out what is the most... What is the thing that actually matters in this? So the research bit...Because when you are dealing with oral history, you cannot just take people's words as they say it. You have to check up all the sources, and this is what took up our [time?]...Basically we used peoples oral history as a clue, and then we tried to see if we could organize something out of it . Not even one individual who we interviewed in the movie could say we have a clear picture of what happened in 1955 and then why it happened. So this kind of a collected effort that we put together in this film.

Audience (in Chinese) : will there be a chinese version?

Louisa: there is a chinese version which is showing on april 4th. And we are releasing dvd after the festival in both chinese and english, and there is a bilingual book also on that. Becuase I realize this is really a very complicated thing and you really need a book on it so my book has three introduction written by kirk denton, the american professor who is an expert on hu fung and lu ling, and one written by peng xiaolian ,my codirector, in which she says why she wants to do it, and one written by me, sort of to record the whole process of making it. And we have the complete script in english and chinese. This book should be available very soon after the festival. Temporarily I spoke to a friend who is in cosmo books and he agreed that we can sell the book there and also /yu ling shu dian/ which is yu ling book shop, and I also have a friend there, they said we can sell the book there. Then of course you can directly buy the book from us, and we have a website. If you search for 'storm under the sun' then you have the blue queen company website which gives you all the related information on this subject if you are interested in exploring further.

Moderator: we wont charge you for the commercial time....(Laughter)

Louisa: bau di (laughter)...Thank you very much for staying through such a heavy movie...

Audience: I dont know if you have seen a film by tom anderson and noel birch called 'not just bounties' about the victims of the mcarthyism in the united states?

Louisa: not that one...

Audience: because this film alludes too to a very important problem, which you are plunging into too, which is that when you are describe the persecution undergone by a group of intellectuals, what is usually left over is the nature of an artistic product. And so I have two questions about this. First of all, is the work of the Hu Feng clique available in china, are people publishing and reading them? And secondly could you describe the kind of literature they were producing, because it is clear they were persecuted for the wrong reason but sometimes I think that maybe as artists what they produced might also have irritated the powers that be. You give us a sense that mao was not interested in lu xun's irony, and I was wondering if there was maybe something in that kind of literature that may have irritated mao tze dont and the clique around him for aesthetic reasons as well?

Louisa: this is a very good quyestion because I did do some research on that. But my impression wasnt that their literature stands out so much different from others. Its only because they are Hu Feng's friends. Of course Hu Feng has his own literary theopry which focusses on the writer's subjectivity, and on the writer's poeer of expressing the world that he recognizes, but then becaus eof their relation with Hu Feng, this is the main thing , and not so much that what they write has a subversive content of that sort. But the theoretical discussion was always there, like ah long says [art is politics] and mao said [art serves polotics ] so this is basically the thing between Hu Feng and mao, this is where the difference is.

Audience : Was it 'good" literature?

Louisa: Their literature? In the 1940's the most important literature, lu ling's was very impoortant, but then after 1955 they were just erased from Chinese literature. So when we grew up and we read everybody who wrote a criticism in the People's Daily, like Ba Jing, Cao Yue, all these important writers we know all of them, but we never heard of Lu Ling. This is why only after the 1980's when people started to say, "Ok, we lost a generation of writers, these are the July school who got so much influence in the 1930's and 1940's and they are lost because the Communist Party erased them." And after 1980 they still have a problem publishing their early works. This is a thing why the Hu Feng clique suffered more than the Rightists or the Cultural Revolution people suffered in that, is because they are a select, elite group, selected by Mao himself. This is why like other people would not touch it, and would say ...Like...I heard some of you laughing when wang rong complained that he didnt get his 25 zears salary back. Some of my students watched it and said 'He"s an intellectual! He shouldnt complain about this money, he should be higher than that!" But Xiaolian said , 'No! The financial thing, the reimbursement is a real recognition of what you did something wrong." and said, "Look at Japan, they never paid back after the war, so its not considered a foemal apology" So she insisted and I also thought that that bit should be there as well.

Moderator: Because if Japan apologzed, they knew they have to pay, they knew they have to pay a price, thats why they never apologize... (Chinese) one more question, its kind of getting late...

Audience: Would you like to share some of your present feelings about the Hu Feng incident? Do you think it is a tragedy or just a mistake?

Louisa: When I was editing this film I kind of hoped that you would laugh a bit more than that, because I didnt want this to be a miserable story. I wanted to bring the irony in it. This is why we used the music and the [animations]...But when people usually are watching, then they kind of felt the weight of the subject matter, and they feel this weight, and Xiaolian is still under the weight. But I grey up after the Cultural Revolution, I dont have a personal memory of this and this is why Kirk Denton, he saw a separate version of this, and he said, "The most interesting thing about this film is from the two directors: one has a personal memory of it and wants to address to the emotional suffering of the people in it, and the other does not have a personal memory of the incident so she wants to present the whole incident from a more objective historical point of view." And he thought that these two points of view were constantly in there, which has a point of tension and makes this doccumentary different form other documentaries. And also you probably know that CCTV is the only place that makes historical documentaries about China and so it is very very rare for independents to do something like that, so we want to challenge that. So thank you for your questions...

Moderator: Thank you for coming, if you have further questions we can continue the discussion outside...