How China Reached Into New York to Stop a Tiny Film Festival
A showcase for independent Chinese films was scrapped after the Chinese authorities pressured directors, moderators and even a volunteer to pull out.
The phone call came around 5 a.m. to Zhu Rikun, the organizer of a new Chinese independent film festival in New York City. It was his father in China, his voice sounding strange. He asked if Mr. Zhu was up to anything bad, Mr. Zhu recalled, and urged him not to do anything that would hurt China.
In the following days, Mr. Zhu received more vague messages. They were from the directors whose films he was preparing to screen at the festival, people scheduled to moderate discussions and one volunteer. All told him they wanted to withdraw.
Most declined to give Mr. Zhu an explanation or cited personal reasons. But a few confided that they or their relatives had been told by the Chinese police to pull out, he said.
Two days before the festival was supposed to open last Saturday, Mr. Zhu decided to cancel it.
“I am not making this decision out of fear or submission,” he wrote on the festival’s website. “But I hope this announcement of the cancellation of IndieChina Film Festival will make certain unknown forces stop harassing all the directors, guests, former staff, volunteers and my friends and family.”
The apparent official intimidation elicited by the festival — which by Mr. Zhu’s own description was small, low-profile and likely to have limited impact within China — shows how far the Chinese government is willing to go to suppress critical voices, even thousands of miles away. Some of the participants have lived overseas for years, said Mr. Zhu, a filmmaker who moved from China to New York in 2014. Even foreign citizens or people not of Chinese heritage were not spared, with some being pressured by their employers, Mr. Zhu said.
Several of the films touched on topics the Chinese government is sensitive about, such as the coronavirus pandemic or the one-child policy. But others, Mr. Zhu said, could have been shown in mainstream cinemas in China.
“I never thought about hiding this, like it was an underground event. If we were in China, I’d probably do that,” he said in an interview. But “that this would become so hard even in New York was totally beyond my expectations.”
The space for independent films has been largely erased in China, as Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, has sought to enforce strict ideological purity. The small independent festivals that were established in the 2000s, showing films not submitted to state censors for approval — and therefore not allowed to screen commercially — were shut down years ago. Directors who made films critical of the government have been imprisoned or fined.
Some Chinese have sought refuge overseas. A year after the Beijing Independent Film Festival (of which Mr. Zhu was a co-founder) was shut down, some films were screened in New York. Chinese living abroad have set up Chinese-language bookstores, and organized comedy shows and pop-up salons to discuss culture and current affairs in Tokyo, London and Chiang Mai, Thailand.
But increasingly, government repression has followed. In July, the Chinese Embassy in Bangkok successfully pressured a museum there to partially censor an exhibition that the Chinese authorities said advocated independence for Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong. A documentary about waters disputed between China and the Philippines was pulled from a film festival in Manila earlier this year, with the Filipina director citing “external factors.”
Mr. Zhu, who started planning the New York festival earlier this year, had advertised it on Chinese social media and knew that the authorities might take notice. But he thought that the worst that could happen was that he alone might encounter problems visiting China, he said.
He received around 200 submissions from filmmakers based all around the world and selected 31. He collected about $1,000 in online donations, but mostly funded the event himself. He had expected around 60 to 70 attendees at each screening.
But about a week before the opening, even as some festival guests were already starting to arrive in New York, the Chinese authorities were mobilizing.
Four Chinese police officers visited a filmmaker who lives in China and who had been set to participate in Mr. Zhu’s festival. The filmmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that the authorities were unhappy with Mr. Zhu and that the festival was an act of smearing China from abroad.
The filmmaker agreed to withdraw from the festival. The person also stopped working on their current project, describing the pressure as suffocating.
The scale of the intimidation around the world shows the government’s expanding surveillance power, said Maya Wang, the associate Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “It’s incredibly chilling for anyone who has some remote connection to China.”
In a written response to questions about the festival, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that it wasn’t familiar with the specific circumstances, but that Human Rights Watch had “long been prejudiced against China.”
Mr. Zhu said he didn’t know whether he’d try to organize another festival. It was too late to cancel the event space he’d booked in Brooklyn.
“I’ll just go there and watch movies myself,” he said.
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people.
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