Max Golomidov, the director of Yoyogi Haiku talks abou the film

Max Golomidov, the director of Yoyogi Haiku talks with Deborah Kingsland, co-director of Stronger than Fiction.

Deb: Congratulations on Yoyogi. You recently attended the World Premiere. Tell us about it.

Max: The world premiere of Yoyogi took place at Jihlava Documentary Film Festival, Czech Republic (October, 2022). We had a good spot in the screening schedule and it was a full house. It is a unique experience observing how people react and watch your film. A few laughs here and there, all sorts of reactions to scenes I thought would hardly get recognized. And the Q &A was also very lovely and intense.

Deb: Can you tell us how you came up with the idea for the film?

Max : After moving to Japan in 2014 I found myself visiting parks a lot. Those visits reminded me of my homeland of Estonia which is a quiet place.Tokyo is very noisy - I love the way parks are designed here; once you’re inside, you barely notice you’re in the very heart of a big megapolis.So Yoyogi Park became my go-to place. It's a public park, always open, easy to get to. One day I took my camera with me and thought I would start “collecting”, capturing those precious moments of life inside the park.

Deb: Hannah de Feyter, my co-director and I love Yoyogi. We both smiled all the way through and don't exactly know why. It's magical. How did you arrive at the decision to follow a strict format of only shooting wide shots ?

Max: It’s good when film makes you smile- smiling is what we need these days! From the very beginning I wanted to go 100% observational style, zero staging, no interviews, no random shot sizes, static shots, no distraction with unnecessary camera movements. I planned my shots so that all “action” takes place within the limits of the frame (almost like on a stage in the theatre). I used to come to the park completely unprepared - curious as to what the park would offer me. Sometimes nothing at all, sometimes those little “gems” would happen. I would walk around the park, observing and waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. I used to feel a bit like a hunter.

I chose wide shots - a safe shot-size for this style of film. Yet, I still call it “an intimate distance”. I wasn’t very close, yet wasn’t far enough to call it “candid/spy” camera, most of the time I was seen/noticed.

Deb: What were your criteria for shots that made it to the final edit?

Max: We picked the most precious moments with a symbolical action “link” at the beginning and in the end of each shot, this way I was able to connect scenes: a tree branch falls down and this connects with the boy landing a successful front flip; water from a water-gun links well with a spout of water rising from a fountain, and so on. There’re tons of hidden links throughout the film. Because of the decision to use such links, I had to give up some very interesting scenes simply because there was nothing I could them link with.

Deb :The people who appear in Yoyogi seem unaware of the camera. How was this possible?  Were you using a very long lens or did you hide the camera  ? 

Max: The whole film was shot with just one lens (35mm). This is not a very “hidden camera” approach, due to the distance I chose to stick to. Once I noticed something was happening - I simply went for it, started capturing it, then sorted out all the talk and permissions later. Most of the time people were very friendly and open-minded saying - “If it’s something that is interesting to you - feel free to record”. And I did, often filming one person for an hour or more. It might have been a bit annoying to them (:

Deb: How long did it take for you to shoot the film? What was the post-production schedule? 

Max: My first visit to Yoyogi Park with my camera was in December 2017, and I finished shooting at the point when Covid hit Japan, I didn’t want to include Covid in the film so the footage would be timeless- you would hardly know when it was recorded. Editing took a few months. My on-location sound was barely usable due to noise, constant crows around, cicadas and wide shots. So we redesigned and re-recorded almost all sounds that you hear in the film. Also, it was my first time working with a foley artist.

Could you name a few filmmakers whose work you particularly admire.

Max: Hard to give names, too many of them…Sergey Dvortsevoy, Viktor Kossakovsky, Michael Glawogger, Andrey Tarkovsky, Ulrich Seidl, Gaspar Noe, Wong Kar-Wai…

Deb: Do you draw inspiration from Estonian or Japanese culture? 

Max: I draw inspiration mostly from everything around me: people walking down the streets, books, music, nature, painting, unexpected new places…

Deb: You are a colourist. Can you tell us a little about your decisions on how you graded the film.

The film was shot on a digital camera, but I always try to give the digital image a sort of “analogue” film characteristic feel without going crazy, just keeping it natural, soft, less crisp probably…

Deb: What do you think is the most accurate logline for Yoyogi? 

Max: An observation of unnoticed things in a public park of Tokyo. Sorry, that doesn’t sound fancy, but it is probably the most accurate description.

Deb: Are you working on a new film? 

Max: Hard to answer that. Way too much stuff happening non-stop all around, it’s up to us to notice something that is close to our hearts. I keep observing and searching…

still from Yoyogi Haiku

Max Golomidov is a cinematographer, colorist and director. He was born in Estonia, Tallinn. He graduated from Baltic Film and Media School as a cinematographer in 2008. He filmed such documentaries as Anthill (Sipelgapesa), Celebration (Prazdnik), Hippodrome by Vladimir Loginov, fiction film Kontora by Anshul Chauhan. 

Max did color for Rubiks Road by Laila Pakalnina and Close relations by Vitali Manksi. Max moved to Japan, Tokyo in 2014 following a job offer as a colorist. 

Yoyogi documentary is Max’s directorial debut set in Tokyo’s park called Yoyogi.

BroadAgenda Editor Ginger Gorman speaks with Qiong: The psychological aftermath of China’s One Child Policy

The psychological aftermath of China’s One Child Policy

Oct 16, 2022 | Grief, Politics, Family, Gender, Film, International, Mothering, Parenting, History, Fathering, First Person, Culture, Relationships, Misogyny, Trauma, Feature

Written by Ginger Gorman

source: https://www.broadagenda.com.au/2022/the-psychological-aftermath-of-chinas-one-child-policy-2/?fbclid=IwAR1N-xqmhkITKiPGrsTmbSRClJW08QPbkJwzWVV2Q8lgcmXK8_Krwr-l0L0

This afternoon (Sunday, October 16) All About My Sisters, a deeply personal take on the psychological aftermath of China’s One Child Policy is screening in Canberra. It screens again later this month.

At the height of the One Child Policy in China, many baby girls were unwanted. Twenty years ago, when film director Wang Qiong’s parents—desperate for a boy—learned that they were expecting another daughter, they made a series of decisions that have haunted the family ever since.

BroadAgenda Editor Ginger Gorman speaks with Qiong.

Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with BroadAgenda. Congratulations on your acclaimed documentary, All About My Sisters. Firstly, tell us a bit about yourself. Who are you and what kind of films do you make? 

My name is Wang Qiong, a Chinese documentary filmmaker. My films are about 苦 (the bitterness of life) – a concept from Buddhism –  and how people deal with it.

For those people who don’t know anything about China’s history and the ‘One Child Policy,’ can you explain it for us in a nutshell? How did it impact baby girls in particular?

The One Child Policy was a strict population control policy that restricted each family to have no more than one child as a respond to the population growth in China. It was established in 1982 and replaced by Two-Child Policy in 2015. Nowadays people are encouraged to have more children to deal with the aging of the population.

The One Child Policy had a direct impact on baby girls as it combined with the long-lasting phenomenon of preference to boys (重男轻女). Because people were only allowed to have one child, many families, in particular those from rural areas, wanted to make sure their first child was a boy. Aborting baby girls then became one of the solutions, and abandonment was another.

And what about your family? Who is in your family and how did that policy affect your lives?

As you can see in the film, every single member in my family was haunted by not only the policy but also the tradition of preference to boys. To me the tragedy is given by the combination of these two things. In order to have a son under the pressure of the policy, my mother had eight pregnancies and my parents hid from here to there for almost ten years. I am the second child in my family and like Jin, I was not welcome.

My aunt, the midwife who made the delivery when my mother was giving birth to me, once recalled that the moment I was born, the first thing my dad said was “a girl again?” with a heavy sign. I’m lucky that they kept me. But they had to send me to someone else to take care of as they needed to pretend that they didn’t have a second child.

So I had to live my different relatives in the first five years in my life, and that experience had subtly influenced my relationship with my parents. There was a period of time when I was temporally adopted by my second uncle, I even forgot that I had parents – my life was all about the giant buffalo I had to take care every day, my uncle that beat me up often when I refused to eat as much as they required, and villagers who always teased me that my mom would never come back.

Even after I returned to my parents as I grew up, I never feel at home even until today. Life was hard for my parents back then – they had to make a living, and to make a son secretly, they lost their patience with everything including their children. I was always scolded and beat up when I didn’t behave well. My first suicidal try was at nine (years old). Living with my parents was hard for me when I was a child and teenager.

Wang says her family’s story was always opaque. [Her sister] “Jin’s story was told by my parents and other adult family members very fragmentarily every year.” Picture: Supplied

Life was, and still is unquestionably much harder for Jin. We were both unwanted girls, but she was not that lucky as she was the chosen one to be disappeared. She survived the abortion, but she has to spend the rest of her life struggling in the complex family relationship. The best thing of her life is that she was given to a family that loves her. I will never forget the last word she said to me before she left the town – she said: “Life has given me love but more pain.”

Sometimes I hope that she can forgive because that might make her life easier, sometimes I don’t because it’s unfair to her. Once in the shooting I asked her if she still hates my parents (she even didn’t want me to call them “our parents”), she said she started to understand them as she grew up and she understands how important a son means to a family. I don’t know if that thought had made her life easier, but it was very ironic and painful to me that she said that. She accepted a rule that almost killed her.

I started to realize that how possible a person can be changed by a society. That’s the same power that convinced my parents to believe that boys are more important the girls and that forced my elder sister, Li, to bear a son for her husband. As a boy, my younger brother is the only wanted child in my family but that’s probably not from love – he’s here only because he can carry the family name by having a son or more in the future.

What made you decide to pick up a camera and tell this heartbreaking and acutely personal story?

I made this film because I wanted to know more about my family and I wanted to reconcile Jin’s relationship with my parents. I also wanted to know what kind of society I was born in when I was unable to know anything about it.

I can’t imagine how hard this must have been for you, your family and your sister, Jin (in particular). What can you tell me about the how confronting this process was – and how you navigated those minefields?

It was hard for me to ask questions with my family, especially my parents. I remember when I was doing the interview with them, my hands were shaking. In China, families especially those from rural areas don’t usually have intimate conversations like this. We don’t talk about things. We just live the life. So I was extremely nervous and anxious when I was holding my notebook with all the questions I wrote down to ask my parents.

What I did was to lie to them to make the conversations more comfortable. Instead of telling the real purpose of making this film, I told them it’s a school assignment, and they believed it. Talking to Jin was easier because we are very close and I felt trusted by her. We talked about anything since we were children. My conversations with Li was also challenging as I was not really close to her. I tried to get closer with her and it happened when I spent more time with her.

A still from the film. Picture: Supplied

All families have secrets. But how did to manage to get your family to talk about – and tease out – this topic that had never been discussed and unpicked? 

To most of others, what happened to my family was astonishing, but to my family, it’s already “normalized” as they live within it and as it happened to other people around them too.

They hear so many similar stories from people they know in the town. They don’t think they are “special”. I think the difficult part for them was for them to recall all the bad memories and to be emotional again in front of me. I don’t think I made any special efforts, except just listening to help them say it all out [loud].

You have been praised for your quiet, investigative voice in the film. But what did you learn from this process? What impact did it have on your family? 

Before I started this project, I hated my parents for aborting and abandoning Jin. I thought they were just being stupid to be convinced that sons are better than girls.

As I had more and more conversations with them, I started to understand where the decisions came from and the sufferings they had been through for making those hard decisions. This film lets me I know more about my family and where we came from. And I have learned that sometimes violence is not a choice but an effect from a bigger violence.

What messages does your film leave the audience with about love and belonging? 

Love needs willpower.

Is there anything else you want to say?  

We all suffered, and we are all expected to forgive.

• Picture at top: Filming over the course of seven years, Wang captures moments of vulnerability, anguish and joy with insight and delicate artistry, connecting us with the universal desire for love and belonging that lies beneath her family’s difficult history. Picture: Supplied

Ginger Gorman

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Ginger Gorman is a fearless and multi award-winning social justice journalist and feminist. Ginger’s bestselling book, Troll Hunting, came out in 2019. Since then, she’s been in demand both nationally and globally as an expert on cyberhate and the real-life harm predator trolling can do. She's also the editor of BroadAgenda and gender editor at HerCanberra. Ginger hosts the popular "Seriously Social" podcast for the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Follow her on Twitter.

LIVING ARTS CANBERRA: ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS

Stronger than Fiction Documentary Film Festival
Dendy Canberra
Sunday 16 October 2022 at 3pm
Friday 21 October 2022 at 6pm

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW: https://www.livingartscanberra.com.au/all-about-my-sisters/

Twenty years ago, when film director Wang Qiong’s parents, who were desperate for a boy, learned that they were instead expecting another daughter, they made a series of decisions that have haunted the family ever since.

Stronger Than Fiction’s co-director, Deborah Kingsland, discusses All about my Sisters

In her debut film made over seven years, Qiong digs into her family’s dramas and traumas, exploring the complexity of politics, gender, sex, birth control and social-political power over women’s bodies. The film explores the universal need for love and belonging.

Bookings: https://www.dendy.com.au/movies/stronger-than-fiction-documentary-series-2022-all-about-my-sisters

SOURCE: https://www.livingartscanberra.com.au/all-about-my-sisters/