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.
* Eyes & Lenses Ethnographic Film Festival, 2008
* VIENNALE (Vienna International Film Festival), 2008
* Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, 2015
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, KeyframeRelated Films
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SINGLE STREAM
A singular appreciation of waste processing " graceful, mesmeric, almost balletic " Single Stream plunges viewers into the steady flow of a materials recycling facility where hundreds of tons of refuse are sorted each day. Yet another revelatory documentary from Harvard"s Sensory Ethnography Lab Single Stream locates the beauty, efficiency and futurism of an industry built on our culture of excess.
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YUMEN
A collaboration between two Chinese artists, Xu Ruotao and Huang Xiang, and acclaimed American filmmaker J.P. Sniadecki, Yumen is a documentary-fiction hybrid that tells the story of a ghost town, a once-thriving oil-rich community in China's western Gansu province, through a series of wandering characters and inventive vignettes. Produced with the support of SEL
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THE YELLOW BANK
A short documentary that captures the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, The Yellow Bank takes you on a contemplative boat ride across the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China. The film uses the eclipse as a catalyst to explore the way weather, light, and sound affect the urban architectural environment during this extremely rare phenomenon.
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DEMOLITION / CHAIQIAN (拆 - 迁)
Focusing on a vast demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the Sichuan capital in western China, a bustling site emblematic of the rapid growth and development occurring throughout the country, J.P. Sniadecki’s Demolition is a wonderfully patient and revealing portrait of the migrant laborers who work and live in its shadow.
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