Homeland in Postsocialist Wilderness: Chinese Independent Christian Films and Filmmaking

Abstract

Independent Chinese films as a social practice that consciously departed from commercial cinema and art-house films have received rather extensive critical attention in the past two decades. Within this growing corpus, independent Chinese Christian filmmaking and films make a minor though rather distinctive presence. The low-budget titles are often part of the present urban-rural divide as urban-educated filmmakers either travel to or return to the countryside in search of worthwhile stories. In addition, many are taken to show the ways rural Christianity provide an alternative after the disintegration of Confucian moral values. Keeping these two perspectives in mind, this paper examines two stories of trauma in which enduring and living within the aftermath of such disintegration have taken a Christian and community turn instead of going along with the flows of market economy. The films to discuss are low-budget independent films: Raised from Dust (2007) as a fictional feature, and Song of the Wilderness (2018) as a feature documentary. Both films were completed using digital technology and both involved amateurs working with professionally-trained people in the process. My discussion attends to their depiction of a poor, determined, rural Christian female in a homeland setting that has characteristics of a (symbolic) wilderness. A space of deprivation that is close to the reality of death and where faith must meet trials, the wilderness of postsocialist China is also one where rural habitants would succumb to fraud as much as try to forget their dire situations with mundane pleasures. In addition, I shall relate the notion of a postsocialist wilderness to slow trauma, atypical victims and shallow compassion, as well as make reference to the critical discourses on independent faith-related films and filmmaking.