Turn It On: China on Film, 2000 – 2017

Turn It On: China on Film, 2000 – 2017, is a series of documentary films from China cocurated by Ai Weiwei and filmmaker Wang Fen. The series features twenty rarely seen documentaries by more than a dozen filmmakers, including acclaimed Ai Xiaoming, Huang Wenhai, Ji Dan, Tan Danhong, and others whose work investigates the political, social, economic and cultural conditions of contemporary China. The works in this series offer urgent and often raw insights into issues of personal struggle and social justice existing in China today. Selected from hundreds of documentaries made in China over the past two decades, many of the films in “Turn It On” are made by writers and artists with little to no cinematography training, who have been able to take advantage of the proliferation of digital video technology to tell stories about contemporary China even as they face severe challenges in producing and distributing their work. Despite the dramatic, economic and societal conditions in China are often censored.

“This selection of documentary films reflects this harsh reality, which at times is difficult to accept, and even harder to watch.” Ai Weiwei remarks. The title he gave the film series suggests the matter-of-fact approach the filmmakers have taken to simply ‘turn on’ their record devices to observe and record the realities of their environment.

Starting October 13, 2017, it will run for 10 weeks at Solomon R Guggenheim Museum.

This film follows three marginal artists at the turn of the millennium, including the film’s director, on their shared journey through real and psychological oppression to self-discovery.

The “China miracle” has been built on the backs of hundreds of millions of migrant laborers. This film features workers from different provinces spanning two generations who have resisted this force through activist struggle and action.

In 2007 Ai Weiwei invited 1,001 people from China to travel to Kassel, Germany, as part of a participatory event for Documenta 12. Fairytale opens with the project’s inception and takes us through its full enactment, creating a series of portraits woven together by a single utopian event.

Following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, activist Tan Zuoren was arrested for investigating the deaths of thousands of children who died when government-built school buildings collapsed. Ai Weiwei, also investigating the situation, was invited to testify at Tan’s trial and subsequently suffered police harassment that culminated in a beating that caused cranial trauma.This film records Ai and his lawyers as they repeatedly travel to Chengdu to seek an explanation from the authorities.

Mao Zedong died in 1976, but his impersonators are alive and well. This film documents two people who resemble Mao and assume Mao roles in contemporary entertainment.

With rapid urban development spreading across Beijing, a family who scavenges a living from the landfills that once covered the city’s Daxing District struggles against the vagaries of so much change.

Chronicling the lives of two families operating a plastic recycling facility, Plastic China examines global consumption and culture through the eyes and hands of those who handle its refuse.

In this long-form documentary filmed over more than a decade, petitioners at Beijing South Railway Station Petition Office are confronted by contradictions in a system intended to protect citizens from legal injustice and political violation.

After the date rape and murder of her daughter, a mourning mother struggles for justice in a society that denies legal recourse for sexual violence.

A poetic portrayal of the abandoned Sanlidong coal mine and the workers still living there fifty years after the boom of China’s socialist industrialization.

Survivors of the Jiabiangou labor camp and their children recount the persecution of over three thousand people sent for re-education through labor during the Communist Party’s Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957-59.

Hu Jia and Zeng Jinyan are simultaneously the subjects and documentarians in this film that records their everyday experience while Hu was under house arrest from 2004 to 2008.

Four artists living on the margins of society whose passionate discussions belie their impoverished living conditions struggle with the uncertainty of their lives and artistic identities.

Residents of a rural village along the West-East Gas Pipeline project are removed, by force and deceit, from the land that has sheltered them for generations.

Beneath the veneer of celebrations for the 2008 Olympic Games, the 160,000 residents of Suining are forced to face their peculiar fate of satellite debris falling from the sky.

The construction of the Xu-Huai Highway in Hunan province has laid the landscape and many historical and cultural sites to waste. As this miracle of modern engineering takes shape, it offers an apt allegory for the dreams of a nation.