Last night's film @ Carnegie

Wednesday evening John and I went to the Carnegie to see Getting Home a comedy drama presented by Cincinnati World Cinema.

This is the second CWC art film we have seen based on the Chinese proverb "a falling leaf returns to it's roots". Traditional Chinese belief is a deceased body must be returned to his/her birth village so the body does not transform into a "hungry ghost". This custom is complicated by the fact it is illegal to hand carry a dead body. This 2 hour subtitled movie is based on a real incident in 2006. In the movie 2 rural middle age migrant construction workers in a big city promise to transport either's body if they should die while they work away from home. One dies in a work related accident and the film then becomes somewhat of a road trip while the other friend carries his dead friend to his home near the Three Gorges mega-dam.

This movie was a drama / comedy but based on the reaction from the Chinese ladies seated behind us it is safe to say John and I missed some of the humor but definitely not all. Anyhow, the film did confirm Asian values/themes we have read or seen in other films including:

1. the value of friendship;
2. mother's greatly depriving themselves for the comfort of their children; and
3. family shunning "imperfect" (disfigured or diseased) family

and then some other realities that were new to us:

1. wealthy rural people sometimes fake their own deaths to find out who really loves and respects them;
2. construction companies sometimes will cheat rural employees by paying them in counterfeit money;
3. some unscrupulous highway restaurants overcharge patrons and use thugs to extort payment; and
4. there is an effort to crack down on the seedy blood banks that will buy blood from even the infected.

The film divides people rather neatly into 2 types: one that has empathy for others and the other that is self interested and generally portraying the rural poor in the first type and new rich in the latter. One other thing you have to overlook with the film is that the body never decays, but overall quite thought provoking.

The other Chinese art film based on the "falling leaf" proverb that we rented a couple of years ago was The Road Home. In this movie a middle aged engineer returns to his birth city after his father has died. His mother insists the son hand carry his father's body from the city morgue to their village. The son does not want to but after listening to his mom tell the parents love story he agrees to her wishes. Most of this film tells how the parents met and fell in love in the 1950's when she was a farm girl and the father was an older teacher sent to her village by the government.

Another film we saw 2 years ago at the Art Museum was The Blood of Yingzhou District. This was a 39 minute short documentary that won an Oscar among many other international and humanitarian awards in 2007. This film was about the effect of AIDS on orphans in Anhui Province.

Pictured below is the Director Ruby Yang, a Chinese-American documentarian who founded the Chang Ai Media Project with a mission to promote AIDS understanding and prevention. This film follow a year in the life of 6 children orphaned because of AIDS. Some of the children were infected and some were not but all were shunned by being associated with this disease.

The name of the little boy in the cap above is GaoJun. He was infected. His heartbreaking story was briefly uplifting when he was adopted by two HIV positive parents and he blossoms under their loving care.

The picture of the 3 Huang children were orphaned because of aids but not infected themselves. They were ostracized by their neighbors but succeeding in their studies providing some hope for their future. The 3rd little girl was infected and rejected by her family. Her name was NanNan and it was heartbreaking how excited she was to be a flower girl in her sister's wedding even though her sister would not disclose her condition to her in-laws and was conflicted about affiliation with NanNan.

The good news about this film is that it may be at least partially responsible for changing attitudes towards AIDS. Four of the children in this film were invited to visit Premier Wen Jiabao on World Aid's Day December 1, 2006.

The director of this documentary was also the editor of a fascinating PBS series we own by Bill Moyers from 2003 called Becoming American: The Chinese Experience. We learned a lot from this series including the 3 designations Chinese Americans often categorize themselves:

1. ABC - American Born Chinese;
2. FOB - Fresh off the Boat; and
3. Twinkies - yellow on the outside and white on the inside.