Between
Wu Wenguang
Release year: 2017
Run time: 70 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
Artist Gao Bo is the main character in this film. In 1989, Gao Bo was one of five artists featured in my first documentary, Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers. These artists bravely chose a kind of free artist’s life in Beijing in the 1980s, the earliest free artists after the Maoist period. Five years later, in 1994, I filmed Gao Bo again, to document how he was making a new life in Paris as a Chinese artist. That film is At Home in the World.
In 2016, after more than 20 years, I filmed Gao Bo in Beijing, in the village in which we live together. We considered what life experiences we have had and what artistic ideals we have been searching for. I chose to call the film Between to suggest the distance between Beijing and Paris, the two spaces where Gao Bo has spent his life, but also to imagine how close Gao Bo is to the artistic dream he has been searching for till now.
Director biography
Wu was born in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province in 1956. After graduating from secondary school in 1974, Wu was sent to the countryside, where he worked as a farmer for four years. Between 1978 and 1982, he studied Chinese literature at Yunnan University. After university, Wu worked for three years as a teacher at a junior high school, and after, for four years in television as a journalist. Wu left television and moved to Beijing in 1988 to be an independent documentary filmmaker, freelance writer, and creator and producer of dance/theatre. Wu has completed ten documentaries, including Bumming in Beijing (1990), 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1993), Jiang Hu: Life on the Road (1999), Fuck Cinema (2005), Treating (2010), Bare Your Stuff (2010), Because of Hunger: Diary I by Wu (2013), Investigating My Father (2016). These have screened at many film festivals world-wide. He has also published four books of no-fiction.
In 1994, Wu co-founded the independent dance group Living Dance Studio with Wen Hui in Beijing, and created/performed a series of dance performances. These included works like Report on Giving Birth (1999), Report on the Body (2003), Report on 37.8 º (2005), Memory (2008), Memory II: Hunger (2010), which have toured festivals all over the world. In 2005, Wu co-founded the independent art space Caochangdi Workstation in Beijing. Since then, Wu has established a series of documentary and performance programmes, in particular the Village Documentary Project (established in 2005) and Folk Memory Project (established in 2010).