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Jiang Hu: Life on the Road
CHINA / 1999 / Chinese / Color / Video / 150 min Director, Script, Editing, Producer: Wu Wenguang Photographer: Su Ming Sound: Li Nin Production Company , Source: Wu Documentary Studio 4-501, Bingjiaokou Hutong 79#, Keying Sushe Beijing 100088 CHINA Phone: 86-10-62014341 / Fax: 86-10-82085022 E-mail: wuwengua@public3.bta.net.cn		Wu Wenguang Born in Yunnan, China in 1956. Went to the countryside after graduating from high school in 1974, and worked as an elementary school teacher for three years. Entered the Department of the Literature at Yunnan University in 1978, and graduated in 1982. Taught at a junior high school for three years, and joined a television network in 1985 to work as a news journalist for four years. Left the TV station in 1989 to become an independent documentary filmmaker and freelance writer. Documentary films include: Bumming in Beijing-The Last Dreamers (1990); 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1993), Ogawa Shinsuke Prize at YIDFF'93, and At Home in the World (1995).
Winner of the 1993 Ogawa Shinsuke Prize, Wu Wenguang presents a new video work. A father and son duo persuades fellow villagers to join a big tent show and go on the road, leaving their traditional but poor farming community behind. Featuring karaoke pop songs and young women dancing in bikini outfits, the show travels around various nondescript suburbs. But with the 50th national anniversary closing in, government officials are tightening their regulations on show troupes. Business is bad, local gangsters want a cut of the pie, and the police hint that they can help, but for a price. The boss hasn't paid the performers for months, and frustration is rising under the single tent roof. . . <Director's Statement Jiang hu is a particularly Chinese word, and hence one that is especially hard to translate. The two Chinese characters denote ﾔriver' and ﾔlake,' but the word implies something quite different than a geographic entity. The word can mean leaving one's familiar turf on a dangerous journey without any sense of the future, in effect wandering "another life." Or it can mean being thrown out of home and onto the street. In this sense, then, the characters in my film are not pursuing a so-called gypsy existence. Instead, these people who were so anxious to leave home to follow a life on the road eventually dream of making a lot of money and returning home, their existence devoid of such romanticism of the road. Ten years ago, I shot my first fully independent documentary, Bumming in Beijing - The Last Dreamers. It was the story of five young artists from the provinces who go to Beijing to pursue their dreams of art. Now, what fascinates me and what I have chosen to document is a group of young farmers ... they've left their homes to travel, pitching tents as they go where they perform their songs and dances. I think the reason they fascinate me is because our fates have all been thrown out "onto the street.
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