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This introduction to the special issue, ‘Engagement, Witnessing and Activism: Independent Chinese Documentary Filmmakers’ Different Positions, Approaches and Aesthetics,’ argues that how the political is registered and expressed in Chinese activist documentaries cannot simply be read through Western ideas, concepts and aesthetics. Rather, Chinese work has been shaped partly in relation to state-sanctioned public discourse, and partly through the localising of international influences according to Chinese socio-political conditions. Contemporary Chinese activist documentary makers have chosen as their primarymodus operandian open, exploratory engagement with the ‘grassroots’ (jiceng). The core commitment in this approach is to the truth of the on-screen subject’s experienceas they themselves see it. Modes of engagement with the grassroots include: making visible people and identities that state-sanctioned representations hide or gloss over; bearing witness to events and situations that are similarly hidden, or presented in a very particular manner, in state-sanctioned representations; and exploring memories and historical experiences which are otherwise unacknowledged or presented within narrow interpretive parameters in state-sanctioned media. This introduction details how the articles in this special issue analyse and discuss Chinese activist works that utilise one or more of these modes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Zhang Zhen has recently brought Jane M. Gaines’ notion of ‘political mimesis’ to bear on a young lineage of Chinese activist documentaries. This article considers the appropriateness of political mimesis as a critical tool for understanding Chinese activist works, arguing it needs to be heavily qualified. The article proposes that Laura Rascaroli’s theorisation of the essay film can help us understand the critical dialogue Chinese activist documentaries seek to open with viewers, through a close analysis of Hu Jie’s pioneeringSearching for Lin Zhao’s Soul(2004). The article considers how Hu Jie encourages the forging of an emotional bond between viewers and his film’s absent subject – the murdered dissident Lin Zhao – via the filmmaker’s embodied presence on screen. It then analyses how Hu Jie uses a mode of direct, embodied address to insert viewers into a politicised dialogue in the film’s concluding moments, via an act of dialogical interpolation similar to that which Rascaroli describes in relation to the essay film. It is through its emotive representation of a political ‘martyr’ and the interpolation of the viewer into a politicised dialogue relevant to the present thatSearching for Lin Zhao’s Soulachieves is efficacy as an ‘activist’ text. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the impact of cross-border collaboration on independent Chinese documentary. Through a study of Wang Jiuliang's Plastic China, I argue that the film, which passed through training events run by CNEX and the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Programme in China, bears the formal impact of the industrial-humanitarian logic central to these workshops: character-driven storytelling as the key to generating a global Anglophone public for independent Chinese documentary. Tracing this logic through the workshop mechanism, the film's form, and audience reactions to its screening in the UK, I suggest the result is a viewer response privileging personal action over structural critique—what in this context I term "worrying about China." This allows me to locate the documentary in relation to broader liberal arguments over China's place in the world system and assess the limitations of this approach to "going global" for independent Chinese documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data activism –or data-centered campaigning, mobilization, and research– is a hybrid, shifting endeavor. Data activist organizations are currently exploring new tools and languages to communicate findings and influence judicial and political processes. However, it is the method of turning data into a film that sets Forensic Architecture (FA) apart from other data activist endeavors. This article employs ideas from social movement and documentary studies to examine six films produced and disseminated by FA. These documentaries expose official corruption relating to abuse and killings in Burundi, Israel and Palestine, Syria, and the Mediterranean. The analysis employs the lenses of data activism and the meta-documentary to think about how FA uses participatory strategies, involves victims and human rights organizations, places science and technology at the center of its narratives, generates counter-stories implicating new data agents and methods, and uses a new fora to influence court cases and change the status quo. Ultimately, it illustrates the potential for impact offered by hybrid forms of data activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights pioneering dancer, choreographer, and multi-media artist Wen Hui's unique contribution to Chinese independent cinema and first person documentary by analyzing her two films made with her 'forgotten' third grandmother. The close reading is grounded in her explorations in intermedia performance and documentary theater centered on body as archive of memory and women's experience. I argue that Listening to Third Grandmother and Dancing with the Third Grandma experiment with an intimate-public camera for constructing a female kinship outside the patriarchal family tree and re-writing women's history through oral storytelling and choreography of the everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on recent works on witnessing, socially engaged documentary filmmaking and studies on the role of new digital technologies for witnessing trauma, recording memories and enabling activism. In a devastating earthquake in Sichuan province on 12 May 2008, almost 90,000 people, at least 5000 of them being children, died. Parents and bystanders provided the first footage of the earthquake, recorded in shaky images on their mobile phones and camcorders, and many later continued to document the destruction and their search for justice, which hailed the beginning of citizen camera witnessing in China. A range of Chinese filmmakers documented the disaster and its aftermath in full-length films, and in doing so helped the victims bear witness to their trauma and fight for justice that was unacknowledged in the traditional media. At least 16 independent documentary films have to date been made dealing with the earthquake in different ways. The films fall into different types, ranging from poetic, observational, expository, participatory and performative, and they also reveal different forms of witnessing practices. The article addresses the witnessing practices of ordinary citizens, enabled by new digital technologies, and analyses a selection of the documentary films with respect to their genre and modes of witnessing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]