Gardena Cinema
14948 Crenshaw Blvd.
Gardena, CA 90247
Saturday, September 12
11 am (Intro) Only One Earth 只有一个地球 (81 min.)
1 pm (Intro) Notes from Beijing 京城散记 (175 min.)
4:30 pm (Intro) Reform School Students 工读生 (142 min.)
8 pm (Intro) I Have Graduated 我毕业了 (92 min.)
Sunday, September 13
3 pm (Intro) Tiananmen 天安门, pts. 1 – 4 (210 min.)
7 pm Tiananmen 天安门, pts. 5 – 8 (204 min.)
Series Introduction
The late 1980s and early 1990s marked one of the most consequential periods of social, political, and cultural transformation in the history of the People’s Republic of China. A decade of reform and opening had dramatically altered the country’s economic and intellectual landscape, bringing increased engagement with the outside world, an expanding sphere of cultural experimentation, and intense debates over China’s political and social future. These transformations culminated in the nationwide protest movement of 1989, after which Chinese society entered a markedly different political and cultural environment. Economic transformation soon accelerated with the deepening of market reforms, even as the possibilities for political liberalization were sharply curtailed.
It was amid these upheavals that a small group of filmmakers working within China Central Television (CCTV) and Beijing Television (BTV) began experimenting with a radically different approaches to documentary cinema. Calling their group Structure, Wave, Youth, Cinema (SWYC), Shi Jian (时间), Wang Zijun (王子军), Kuang Yang (邝杨), and Chen Jue (陈爵) turned their cameras away from the expository conventions and official narratives that had long characterized Chinese television documentary. Instead, they sought out individual lives and experiences: students confronting uncertain futures, migrant workers navigating the capital, artists and musicians participating in an emerging cultural avant-garde, elderly Beijingers recalling a disappearing city, and young people living at the margins of society.
Their methods reflected a broader transformation taking place in Chinese documentary culture. Portable video technology, exposure to international documentary practices, and the intellectual ferment of the 1980s encouraged filmmakers to reconsider the relationship between camera and subject, filmmaker and institution, and documentary image and historical truth. The events of 1989 further altered these relationships. Projects begun within state television could become difficult or impossible to broadcast, while filmmakers increasingly pursued forms of production and circulation outside established institutions.
SWYC occupied a crucial position within this transitional period. Working at the boundary between state television and emerging independent practice, its members produced some of the defining documentaries of their generation (largely unseen and unheralded) and helped lay the foundation for what would become known as China’s New Documentary Film Movement. Viewed together, more than three decades since the inception of their group, SWYC’s films offer both an important genealogy of New Documentary Cinema in China and an unusually intimate historical record of a society undergoing profound change.
Many of these works had rarely been screened before this year. This traveling retrospective brings together SWYC’s major documentaries, allowing audiences to encounter a formative chapter of Chinese nonfiction cinema while seeing the late 1980s and early 1990s through the lives, conversations, spaces, and uncertainties of the people who experienced them.
Tiananmen (天安门)
Dirs. Shi Jian, Chen Jue. 1988–91.
China. 420 min.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Originally commissioned by China Central Television (CCTV), Tiananmen began in 1988, during the final years of the extraordinary intellectual and cultural ferment that had accompanied China’s post-Mao reform era. Conceived as an expansive portrait of Beijing and its inhabitants, the project would ultimately span the political rupture of 1989 and be completed independently in 1991. Its production history thus parallels the transformation of Chinese documentary itself, as filmmakers who had begun experimenting within state television increasingly found themselves working beyond its institutional boundaries.
Across its seven hours, Tiananmen presents an extraordinary range of people: elderly members of the imperial family, migrant workers, artists, students, musicians, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens. Their stories situate the rapidly changing Beijing of the late 1980s within the longer upheavals of twentieth-century Chinese history, while preserving the voices and physical spaces of a city on the verge of dramatic transformation.
Moving fluidly between history, culture, and everyday life, Tiananmen captures a Beijing where old neighborhoods and traditional customs coexisted with rock music, avant-garde art, economic reform, expanding contact with the outside world, and increasingly urgent debates about China’s future. The result is not simply a record of a city, but a remarkable archive of the people, encounters, and moments that defined social and cultural life in China at the end of the 1980s—a preserved memory of a historical inflection point.
I Have Graduated (我毕业了)
Dirs. Shi Jian, Wang Guangli. 1992.
China. 93 min.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Made independently in 1992, I Have Graduated turns to a generation of university students whose college years coincided with the upheavals of the late 1980s and the 1989 student movement. Following graduating seniors at universities across Beijing as they prepare to leave campus, the film records candid conversations about friendship, love, careers, family expectations, studying abroad, and their enduring traumatic memories of June 4, 1989.
The historical circumstances remain an important presence in these conversations, even when they are not their explicit subject. By 1992, the political idealism associated with the 1980s had given way to a different national atmosphere, while renewed economic reforms opened up new possibilities—and new pressures—for young Chinese entering adulthood.
More than thirty years later, I Have Graduated offers a remarkably intimate portrait of this generational transition. Its students stand at the intersection of two eras: shaped by the intellectual and political currents of the 1980s, yet preparing to enter the increasingly market-oriented China that would emerge during the 1990s, and that endures today.
Only One Earth (只有一个地球)
Dirs. Chen Jue, Jiu Ke. 1990.
China. 81 min.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Produced for China’s first Earth Day in 1990—but never aired—Only One Earth emerged directly from the intellectual and cultural currents of the late 1980s. Environmental degradation had become an increasingly important subject among Chinese scientists, writers, and intellectuals, for whom questions of pollution, population, industrialization, and ecological destruction were often inseparable from broader debates about modernization and the direction of China’s development.
Combining archival footage, poetic montage, and an unusually experimental essayistic style, the film moves between pollution, deforestation, wildlife loss, famine, and the environmental consequences of industrialization. Its global perspective also reflects the increasing international exchange of the reform era, drawing upon documentary and essay-film traditions that differed sharply from the dominant conventions of Chinese television.
Completed in the aftermath of 1989, Only One Earth stands as both one of the most formally adventurous Chinese documentaries of the period and a revealing artifact of the intellectual culture from which China’s new documentary movement emerged. Environmentalism becomes not only a scientific concern, but a means of asking larger moral, cultural, and philosophical questions about modernization and humanity’s future.
Notes from Beijing (京城散记)
Dirs. Wang Zijun, Sun Yongsheng. 1988–91.
China. 175 min.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Filmed simultaneously with Tiananmen, Notes from Beijing likewise records the Chinese capital from 1988 to 1991. Yet where Tiananmen approaches Beijing expansively, Wang Zijun’s film begins from an intensely personal premise. Part memoir, part city symphony, Notes from Beijing traces the lifelong Beijinger’s path through streets and neighborhoods whose physical appearance and social character were already beginning to change.
Wang weaves first-person reflections, on-the-scene interviews, archival footage, and observations of everyday life into a diaristic meditation on memory, history, and home. The result reflects a broader preoccupation among Chinese intellectuals of the period with parsing individual memory and lived experience from official narratives of history.
Seen now, the film also records a Beijing poised between distinct historical moments: the cultural and intellectual opening of the 1980s, the rupture of 1989, and the accelerated redevelopment and commercialization that would reshape the capital during the following decade. Notes from Beijing transforms the city into a conversation across time, where echoes of the past continually enter contemporary life. More than an irreplaceable record of pre-redevelopment Beijing, Wang’s deeply personal work preserves a way of seeing the capital shaped by an intimate familiarity with its physical and historical landscape.
Reform School Students (工读生)
Dirs. Wang Zijun, Wang Lan. 1991–94.
China. 142 min.
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Filmed over four years in three Beijing reform schools, Reform School Students offers a striking portrait of young people whose lives bear the imprint of social upheavals that began long before they were born. For some of the students, family instability, economic precarity, and estrangement from their parents can be traced in part to the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, particularly the mass relocation of urban youth to the countryside and the difficulties many encountered when attempting to rebuild their lives after returning to the cities. By the early 1990s, the children of this generation were coming of age in a radically different China, yet the consequences of their parents’ experiences during the Mao years continued to shape the circumstances in which they lived.
With rare access to students, families, teachers, and administrators, filmmakers Wang Zijun and Wang Lan not only observe life inside the schools but probe the hopes, fears, family circumstances, and complicated relationships of the young people who attend them. Rather than treating students as social problems to be corrected, the film insists upon their individuality, revealing how categories of delinquency and reform can obscure complex histories of family rupture, economic hardship, and intergenerational trauma.
Reform School Students also makes unusually visible a question rarely posed in Chinese documentary film: what ethical obligations accompany the filmmaker’s claim to record reality? The Wangs continually negotiate the boundaries between witness and intervention, particularly as they confront the possibility that appearing in the documentary could expose its young subjects to lasting stigma. In doing so, Reform School Students becomes a rare meditation on documentary ethics, questioning not only what a camera can reveal, but also the responsibilities that come with turning it on another person’s life.
