What happens to story when it travels? What happens when the character-driven, narrative documentary format is promoted outside Europe and North America by funding bodies and training programs headquartered and managed in the Global North?

In recent years, the Sundance Film Festival has been responsible for premiering and promoting a number of documentaries from Mainland China, most of them character driven narratives. In addition, the Sundance Institute advised on documentary production in China during the early 2010s, specifically through its collaboration with CNEX, the Taiwan Strait-bridging documentary production organization. Through its US workshops, Sundance has become a key agent in the standardization of story for aspiring nonfiction filmmakers in North America. In turn, I want to focus on the significance of the term “story” in the context of the Chinese workshops. In particular, I want to consider story as a format that is attempting to bridge both the commercial and the humanitarian, and how an understanding of this cross-fertilization might shape our interpretation of the documentaries emerging from the Sundance-CNEX collaboration. If learning to work with “story” was one way Sundance initiated independent Chinese filmmakers into the subjectivity of the Hollywood-style independent creative, I would argue that it was also how these directors’ films were fashioned to speak the language of Western human rights liberalism. The Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program’s commitment to the idea of independent documentary as humanitarian intervention can be identified in the tropes and stories characterizing the works it has sponsored in the PRC.

The Sundance-CNEX workshops were a collaboration between the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Programme and CNEX, which stands for “China Next,” or “See Next.” The former supports the production of nonfiction within and without the US; the latter is a Chinese-language documentary production nonprofit established by Ben Tsiang and Ruby Chen, with offices in Taipei, Beijing, and Hong Kong. The first workshop was organized in 2011 by Chen, Tsiang, the film director Fan Lixin, and Cara Mertes, then director of the Sundance Documentary Film Program. According to Sundance, the event consisted of three days of activities at the CNEX Salon in Beijing’s 798 complex. It combined public panels with smaller, closed sessions focused on eleven Chinese documentary projects selected through competitive submission. These latter sessions are what became the pitch workshops, in which Sundance advisors—specially invited film industry professionals, mostly from overseas—provided feedback for the selected filmmakers on rough cuts of their work. The Sundance-CNEX Documentary and Story Edit Lab, a closed workshop focused on editing and narrative, was added in 2016 by Rick Perez, who took over directorship of the Sundance program from Mertes. Both these workshops were modeled on events Sundance had already been running in the US for some years.

In an interview conducted the summer of 2019, Perez described the purpose of these workshops as twofold.{1} First, to support the development of a community of independent documentary filmmakers in the PRC.{2} Second, to help these filmmakers “refine and advance the narrative and storytelling of their work.” But what is meant by the terms “narrative” and “storytelling,” which could manifest in a number of different forms, and why is it important to refine these qualities in independently produced Chinese documentary? The scholar Shan Tong, who conducted research as a participant-observer at the workshops in 2016, argues that their primary aim was to expedite Chinese independent filmmakers’ access to the global market for nonfiction cinema.{3} This was partly achieved through networking with the advisors in person. It was also the ultimate logic of the practical suggestions made to filmmakers during the workshops Tong attended, including suggestions made by CNEX representatives. Participants were told that a character-driven narrative, goal-orientated logic, and the dramatic arc of the three-act structure were the most effective ways of ensuring their films were universally accessible. This accessibility was then framed as the key to selection by major film festivals, and to striking deals with overseas distributors. Classical Hollywood-style narrative was therefore presented as a universal form, and the means through which these filmmakers could transform their documentaries from a local to a global commodity.

Perez recounts that “how do you get into Sundance?” was one of the questions he was regularly asked at these workshops. He said he had always alerted the visiting industry professionals that this was how their advice to filmmakers would be taken, regardless of intent. There is a certain irony to this: the Documentary Film Program and the festival are run by different personnel, and Perez insisted that where possible, a firewall was maintained between projects the program funded, and the programming decisions made by the festival team. At the same time, he also believed that the work of the Documentary Edit and Story Lab had facilitated the selection of specific projects by other festivals. He attributed this success less to the reshaping of rough cuts into a classical Western narrative arc, and more to changes in working practices. As he pointed out, many independent documentary filmmakers in China both shoot and edit their own material. In contrast, most American independent documentary filmmakers work with an editor. One of the key aims of the lab was therefore to encourage directors in the PRC to appreciate the specific role of the nonfiction editor, and the potential advantages of working with a professional who could clarify what the director was trying to say. To the extent that Sundance saw the lab as a way of introducing Chinese filmmakers to American nonfiction filmmaking practice, a particular narrative form appears to have been closely bound up with a specific industrial model of production.

In this context, story takes on a particular significance: it becomes the key to how independent Chinese filmmakers find their voice. Perez described the Sundance Documentary Institute as being “founded on freedom of expression, and the independent artist and the independent voice.” It is this latter quality that character-driven narrative helps shape. Perez’s first encounter with Chinese independent documentary came through CNEX’s own pitch forum in Taipei, in 2013. He said he was especially fascinated by the work of filmmakers from the PRC, because of what he described as their “spectrum of audacity”: some were clearly making material he saw as socially and politically challenging, while others were much more cautious. Sundance’s role became to help these filmmakers to “articulate the story they were proposing to tell”—to enable them to grasp the significance of their subject within a bigger social picture. Perez acknowledged that there would be differences between the narrative forms needed to address a Chinese audience and an overseas audience, stressing that the three-act structure would be needed “if (the filmmaker’s) goal is to try to draw international attention to something that’s going on in your country or story, but if it’s to speak to your fellow community or countrymen, there may be a different pacing, syntax, etc.” Here, classical Hollywood narrative form is critical to documentary, but not exclusively to transform it into a commodity. Instead, to quote Pooja Rangan, it is to activate documentary as a “humanitarian intervention”: a medium that can mitigate the impact of a hostile or absent state, in this instance by drawing global attention to its subject matter, but at the expense of conforming in style and substance to the ideological expectations of western liberal humanism.{4}

Trailer for PLASTIC CHINA, Jiuliang Wang (2016).

This positioning of documentary filmmaking as a form of civil society intervention partly reflects the source of workshop funding. Sundance’s China program was underwritten by a grant from the Open Society Foundations, the organization founded by George Soros precisely to support “justice, democratic governance, and human rights” around the world.{5} When Open Society ceased to sponsor projects in China, the money for the program dried up—one of the reasons why it is no longer running. This funding clearly came with certain expectations. According to Perez, the reason the workshops all included a public element was because Open Society insisted on it, suggesting the funder’s underlying commitment to the principle of the public sphere. Arguably, the logic of humanitarian intervention was therefore built into the program’s design from its inception.

One way to think of story as it is conceived of for these purposes is therefore as a mediating agent that connects the different subjectivities at play in these workshops. On the one hand, both Sundance and CNEX clearly understood the aim of these events as the production of independent filmmakers for the global film and TV industry. The ideal subject here would seem to be a flexible creative, attuned to the demands of a global work model derived from Hollywood, and entrepreneurial enough to grasp networking opportunities provided in the form of personal interaction with industry professionals. On the other hand, Sundance and Open Society seem also to have seen the program as a way of producing filmmakers as civil society agents: people who could use filmmaking for capacity-building at a local level, while also understanding the power of nonfiction as a form of global consciousness-raising. This ideal subject would seem to be that of human rights discourse. Story appears to be a way of weaving these two priorities together. It is the form through which voice is given to both the industry practitioner and the human rights activist. While this might seem superficially surprising, the historical commitment of the Open Society Foundations to open markets as well as individual rights suggests it is less so in practice. Both assume a universal underpinning—the commodity form, the rights-bearing individual—that story is understood to articulate.

If the workshops modeled the practices of both the film and human rights industries, how might we trace these influences, particularly of the latter, on the documentaries that passed through them? Rangan notes that the work of humanizing in humanitarian documentary is predicated on the exclusion of the in- or non-human—of defining the boundaries of what constitutes the human. As she puts it, “if humanity is the ultimate imagined community . . . then documentary immediations can be regarded as part of the ritual, tropic performances of belonging to this community.”{6} The repertoire of gestures that underpins the humanitarian documentary impulse thus helps define certain documentary subjects as worthy of being heard, or of having their lives valued. The question is therefore: can we identify consistent humanitarian tropes in the documentaries emerging from these workshops? And, if we can, what kind of subject do they suggest is worth saving?

One work that Perez explicitly noted as a product of this collaboration, in part because it was the only one he was aware of that was subsequently picked up by the festival proper, was Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China (2016). Wang’s documentary focuses on two families of waste-pickers in Shandong province, on China’s eastern seaboard. The family makes a living recycling plastic waste imported from overseas. While nominally a documentary about environmental degradation, the heart of the film is the story of the families’ two eldest children, Qiqi and Yijie. Qiqi, the son of the small factory’s owner, gets to go to school. Yijie, whose father is merely an employee too poor to afford school fees, does not. The social and environmental consequences of the plastic recycling business are thus mediated through a character-driven narrative focused on two small children, their increasingly distinct personal trajectories, and the role that education is understood to play in gendered social immobility.

It is possible that Plastic China’s foregrounding of the children’s story is coincidental. But, as Rangan notes, the image of the child at risk is central to the humanitarian imagination. It is a trope that subsumes the specificities and contradictions of its subject in a figure that supposedly elicits a universal ethical response.{7} These tensions are clear in Plastic China, where the complex global and class dynamics of the plastic recycling industry get somewhat lost in this story of two little children, one of whom just wants—indeed, implicitly has the right to—an education. The documentary is a clear example of a supposedly universal story being used to generate interest in a specific social issue. But it also demonstrates some of the problems inherent in this approach, and what is lost, consciously or otherwise, when it is adopted.

Research for this piece was enabled by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Independent Cinema in China: State, Market and Film Culture. I would also like to thank Shan Tong for her generosity in sharing the final version of her article with me.