New York film festival canceled after organizer says filmmakers face pressure from Chinese authorities
Zhu Rikun spent months planning a film festival that never happened.
As director of the inaugural IndieChina Film Festival, Zhu was scheduled to welcome Chinese filmmakers and filmmakers to New York this week for a small showcase of independent Chinese films, but he said concerns about harassment led to the event’s suspension two days before its scheduled Nov. 8 start.
Every day this week, Zhu showed up at the empty theater he had reserved for the film festival in protest.
“This was not the film festival I was preparing for,” the filmmaker told NBC News Friday morning.
In a statement released before the festival’s cancellation, the organizer said it had received messages indicating that Chinese filmmakers, directors and producers who were preparing to participate in the event, as well as their relatives, were being harassed.
Many attendees who withdrew from the independent film festival did not explain why or cited “personal reasons,” but a few said they or their family members had been asked to do so by Chinese authorities, according to Zhu.
“I hope that this announcement of the cancellation of the IndieChina Film Festival will allow some unknown forces to stop harassing all directors, guests, former employees, volunteers as well as my friends and family,” Zhu said in a statement posted on the festival’s website.
By the time Zhu suspended the film festival, it was too late for him to cancel the venue he had reserved. Throughout the week, he visited the event space — sometimes alone or with a handful of other filmmakers — to watch a few films and discuss them.
“I’m still a filmmaker. I’m still a Chinese filmmaker and I’m still an independent film curator,” Zhu said, adding that making independent films in China “is really difficult; it’s extremely different from before.”
Before moving to New York a decade ago, Zhu worked at independent film festivals in China for nearly 20 years and co-founded the Beijing Independent Film Festival.
But independent film festivals in China began facing increasing repression after Chinese President Xi Jinping, known for his tight ideological control, came to power in 2012, according to Human Rights Watch. The non-governmental organization investigating global human rights abuses said Chinese authorities had closed the three major independent film festivals in China, including Zhu’s Beijing Independent Film Festival.
“Eventually all my film festivals were banned, none of them could continue,” Zhu said.
Following what happened at his Beijing film festival, Zhu rethought how to organize a film festival focused on Chinese independent films that could avoid censorship – the New York event was the first attempt.
“The Chinese government has reached out to the world to shut down a film festival in New York,” Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “This latest act of transnational repression demonstrates the Chinese government’s desire to control what the world sees and learns about China. »
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to an email from NBC News seeking comment.
China’s Foreign Ministry told the New York Times this week that it was unaware of the specific circumstances surrounding the IndieChina Film Festival and that Human Rights Watch had “a long history of bias against China.”
