The brightest light in the Chinese independent cinema world at this moment is Beijing-based filmmaker and artist Qiu Jiongjiong. In an atmosphere of increasing surveillance and control of non-official, unauthorized artistic activity in China, Qiu, now 44, stands out as an artist with a powerful, complex, engaging vision who has found a way to continue to work without compromise. His new film, A New Old Play, premiered at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival and is now having a series of screenings in North America, following its pickup by Icarus Films via their dGenerate Films Collection.
Qiu grew up steeped in the backstage atmosphere of traditional Chinese theatre, and most of his works remain infused with the sounds and sights he absorbed there. He first achieved domestic fame among art collectors, who buy up, at rather high prices, his semi-fantastical, humorous (and perhaps faintly menacing) portraits of bald, bulbous-headed men. Acquiring a mini DV camera in 2006, he started filming his family and friends, who were prominent in the traditional Sichuan opera world of Chengdu and Leshan. Portraiture is one of the constants in Qiu’s art, both on canvas and video: he makes playfully experimental family portraits of his aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and has also made a series of three portraits of extraordinary individuals—a retired cop, a transsexual performer, and a persecuted elder “rightist.”
Qiu’s six, mainly black-and-white documentaries (four feature-length, one short) climax in A New Old Play, his first work of (semi-)pure fiction. Based on the actual life of his grandfather Qiu Fuxin, a celebrated Sichuan opera “clown,” the film tracks a mythicized, fictionalized version of his life through an epic course of Chinese history from the Republican era of the 1920s through the Maoist ’50s and ’60s, to the beginnings of reform at the end of the ’70s. Qiu’s works’ density and range—with a tonal variety spanning the deeply mournful to the resplendently comic—accommodate unprecedented evocations of the darkest episodes of China’s recent history. But he insists on embedding these in something else: a celebration of creative popular arts, whose vitality and persistence offer emotional reassurance, ideological provocation, and moral inspiration.
Qiu has thought through the theoretical and political dimensions of his craft and storytelling strategies, and explains them in fascinating detail in the discussion below, carried out via Zoom between Toronto and Beijing in May 2022. Cao Liuying provided on-the-spot interpretation; Robin Setton translated this slightly condensed transcript of our talk from Chinese to English.
Cinema Scope: I’d like to ask you first a bit about where you grew up and your early influences. How did your childhood shape you?
I was born in Leshan, Sichuan. My parents and grandparents were migrants to Leshan, but I was born and raised there. I grew up in the theatre, and it was through theatre that I was initiated to the whole universe of the arts, from fine art through literature to drama. The theatre and everything around it—both the stories told onstage, and my life offstage—naturally and unconsciously shaped my first impressions of the world. My grandfather, an actor who specialized in the “clown” roles, was a major influence: he is the Qiu Fuxin of . During my childhood in the ’70s, cultural policy was relaxed somewhat after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the arts began to revive, including access to film. Theatres were also used as public movie houses, so as a youngster I watched a lot of films, including silent ones. My grandfather was familiar with actors like Charlie Chaplin; we would
