SONGHUA

SONGHUA

    Price: $250.00

    Code: 2485

    Directed by J.P. Sniadecki
    2007, 28 minutes
    Purchase: $250 | Classroom rental: $125

    In northeastern China the Songhua River flows west from the border of Russia to the city of Harbin, where four million people depend on it as a source of water. Songhua is a portrait of the varying people that gather where the river meets the city, and an ethnographic study of the intimate ways in which they play and work.

    Through a series of interchanging and overlapping vignettes, filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki presents a full range of the river's value: from couples who fly kites or play cards by its shoreline, to fishermen who drag nets through its waters, to a vendor who relies on its attraction as a popular destination to sell his pinwheels. The river is a place containing multitudes, where a woman cleans up every single piece of trash along the bank, and a boy plays in the sand and drinks from a stagnant river pool littered with debris.

    Filmed only one year after a major chemical spill (one of the largest river spills in recent years), Songhua is at once a tender record of interactions with the natural waterway, and a subtle, but dark consideration of the societal and environmental implications of the river's condition.

    Subjects & Collections



    Festivals & Awards

    * Whitney Bienniale, 2014
    * Eyes & Lenses Ethnographic Film Festival, 2008
    * VIENNALE (Vienna International Film Festival), 2008
    * Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, 2015



    Reviews

    "In his patiently involving setups and thorough documentation of a variety of these riverside tasks, Sniadecki is able to capture an at once troubling and comedic means of everyday existence, one not readily reported or relayed to outside eyes and ears." - Jordan Cronk, Keyframe

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