I haven't read much about 37-year-old director, Gan Xiao'er, from Xin Village in Henan province, especially not on film sites. Gan has had to shoot his films without official permits, his subject matter has been controversial, he runs the risk of official punishment for making his films and he's had to distribute his latest flick himself, all of which are the trials and tribulations that are normally catnip to the arthouse crowd who require their Chinese directors to come with these kinds of outlaw credentials these days. So why hasn't he been embraced by these folks?

Well, maybe because he's a Christian who's making movies about Christianity.

His first movie, THE ONLY SONS (2003) got a decent review in Variety and was screened at Rotterdam, Vancouver and Pusan. His second film, RAISED FROM DUST is about a Christian woman whose husband is suffering from liver disease but the mounting hospital bills are crushing their family and her faith allows her make the decision to let him die in order to pay for her daughter's education. The only review I can find is this one from translated from Thai to English by the folks at Limitless Cinema:

"This film is about a poor woman who has a sick husband staying in a hospital and a daughter who can’t pay tuition fees. What’s surprising is that the film contains no melodramatic scene. This is a low-budget film, full of static shots and stillness. The images seem to be transfixed by the empty atmosphere of rural China. Every scene is so natural, so life-like and so long that it can be a torture. The film is like a documentary without an ounce of sentimentality. We rarely see a close-up scene of the heroine. The story doesn’t seem to move forward. There is no music. Even in the climactic scene, we can only hear a sound of the wheels from her vehicle. This is not a kind of slow-but-deep films as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s, nor a kind of slow-bittter-humorous films as Tsai Ming-liang’s. But this is a film of stillness and silence which is extremely hurtful and powerful."

With 130 million Christians in China worshiping at both official and at underground churches (which are caught in what Gan describes as a manufactured conflict) there's a significant Christian population in China and Gan screened RAISED FROM DUST at several local churches which mostly criticized the film for being downbeat and not containing enough praise and worship. Gan wants to make seven Christian films which he describes as his Seven Seals and he says that he has to make movies about Christianity if he wants to talk about the lives of the working class in China:

"No Chinese films have dealt with the spiritual lives of farmers ... but I'm not willing to shoot [a film about] a farmer without any spiritual activity because it's not the way he is in real life."

The most interesting thing to me about Gan's films are that they're coming from a point of view that's less concerned with dogma and theology and more with the role of spirituality in everyday life, something that's almost totally absent from most modern Chinese films. And he can sound downright dangerous at times.

“The most important thing is whether a person has something to hope for inside. I think a religion, whether it is Christianity, Islam or others, has a major role because it tells us that in the eye of God, we are very precious.”

Reinforcing the value and dignity of human life no matter what your class or social standing is an important element of some of the more muscular brands of Christianity that have historically been concerned with social justice, in particular Liberation Theology that served as a powerful call to arms in Latin America, South Africa and Haiti in the 20th Century. Despite being heavily criticized and later disavowed by the Vatican, Liberation Theology was an essential part of many social justice movements around the world and it made the Catholic Church a leader in places where the poor needed more than a few hymns and prayers once a week. Heck, if it wasn't for Christian churches the Civil Rights movement in the US may never have reached critical mass. So hearing Gan talk about the essential dignity of human life and hearing his plans to make five more movies, one wonders, could Liberation Theology be getting a second wind in China? Because the most politically radical thing I can imagine the Mainland Chinese upper and middle classes not wanting to hear is, "But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first." China doesn't have any room these days for a revolution.

 

(If you're interested in hearing Gan speak and seeing RAISED FROM DUST, NYU's Center for Religion and Media is hosting him in New York City on February 15 for a talk called "The Cross and the Camera: The Films of Gan Xiao'er followed by a screening of RAISED. Go here and scroll down for complete information.)

(A good profile of Gan)

(An even better profile of Gan that introduces us to folks like Brother Lu:

"This underground film, made without permits, was shot in the director’s own home village in Henan. It uses mainly non-professional actors, with many village folks playing themselves. One of them, known as Brother Lu, is a hooligan-turned-church elder. During his wild youth in the 1980s, he was into fighting, gambling and visiting prostitutes. Despite his track record, he was once trusted to collect electricity bills in the village.

“But instead of turning over the money to the electricity bureau,” Gan laughs, “he spent it in a singing and dancing bar, causing a black-out in the whole village.”)

(Berenice Reynaud is a lone voice in the wilderness calling THE ONLY SON "...one of the most exciting discoveries in Chinese cinema of the last few years.")

(Wikipedia on Liberation Theology)