Asian Doumentary Today

책 소개

The Invisible Asia and Asian Documentaries More than a decade ago, when I started to work as a programmer for a documentary film festival, I started to attend film festivals and events in Europe and in America. Like most Asians new to these international events, I was in awe of the film festivals in non-Asian countries such as Amsterdam International Documentary Festival (IDFA) which is the biggest event of its kind in the world and Hot Docs in Toronto, Canada which is the biggest in North America. Their scale and popularity with both the professionals and the public were, indeed, quite impressive. At the same time, I couldn’t help but searching for other Asian faces and Asian topics in the programs. My impression which was the same as many of my Asian peers was that documentaries on Asian issues were limited in number, and those documentaries that were produced by Asian directors were even fewer; the documentaries on Asian issues were mostly made by Europeans, Americans or directors of Asian descent who live in Europe or in America. Such situations are still the case, after a whole decade. There were a few hypotheses to this phenomenon. First, there weren’t that many documentary directors in Asia. Second, most of the documentaries made by Asian directors weren’t appealing enough to be selected into well-known European/American film festivals. Third, most Asian documentaries lacked access to be seen and, hence, the chance to be appreciated. The first hypothesis was easy to repute since we all know that there ARE many Asian filmmakers making documentaries on various subjects in various regions of the world. The second hypothesis was more about aesthetic judgment of documentaries and the world’s overall interest in Asian topics. It required plenty of academic and professional discourse and rendered no easy answers. The third, however, could be a goal for all of us Asians working in the field of documentaryrelated professions to work and make positive changes towards that goal. If I weren’t in Asia myself, nor had I the chance to attend Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan, Yunnan Documentary Festival, and several other individual film festivals all over China and many major film festivals in Asia, or if I didn’t have to curate Taiwan International Documentary Festival, and started to scout for documentaries with Asako FUJIOKA, ZHANG Xian Min, Chalida UABUMRUNGJIT, HONG Hyosook, CHO Young-Jung, and KIM Ji-Seok since 2006 for the Asian Network of Documentary (AND) Fund annually, I wouldn’t have known about the quantity and quality of Asian documentaries and their talented creators from different fields. The events that I had attended scarcely cover the rich documentary scene of Asia. I, for one, didn’t know enough about the development of documentaries in South Asia and even less about the developments in Central Asia. I couldn’t help but wonder about the following: if I, as an Asian programmer, couldn’t easily and fully gain access to most Asian documentaries, how could we expect non-Asian professionals to do so? Not to mention, letting the general public know about Asia through high exposure of Asian documentaries? I have to say, there are dedicated documentary filmmakers in Asia searching and digging for stories, and there must be over a thousand documentaries produced in Asia every year. What we need is to build up convenient and direct channels for those works to be seen. Yet, it’s not a problem unique to Asia. Everyone concerned with this problem all over the world is looking for solutions by sharing information about workable distribution channels and by trying to connect these accesses to the needed. Meanwhile, it is also essential to have a systematic discourse on Asian documentaries for them to be recognized and appreciated. When we, the AND Committee, tried to do exactly that, to comprehensively introduce Asian documentaries, we found that no one was audacious enough to claim to be an expert in Asi…

리뷰 남기기

로그인하면 리뷰를 남길 수 있어요.

리뷰 0개