Du Haibin's "Umbrella"

The 4th Hong Kong Asian Film Festival ends today. Luckily, I had the chance to see a couple films, including Umbrella, the latest from Chinese documentary filmmaker Du Haibin. The film just premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival, where it screened alongside the documentary Useless, by Jia Zhangke (who won the Golden Lion last year for his docudrama Still Life). Not surprisingly, Umbrella opens in an umbrella factory. We see workers in the various stages of assembly, but Du underlines his message by mixing in a sign listing the meager compensation employees earn for each task completed, and a close-up of a young girl's coarse, cracking hands as she sews umbrella spokes to fabric. Workers wear puffy down jackets, gloves and winter boots as they perform these monotonous tasks--the audience can almost feel the chill of the factory floor. One of the most interesting scenes is of the wealthy factory owner, sitting at her umbrella store in a shopping mall. She and several other women sit idly in the store, chatting about what kinds of cars to buy. “Money is for spending,” she tells the other women. Meanwhile, just outside, several women compete to shine the shoes of well-heeled shoppers for 1-2 RMB. In the second half of the film, Du profiles university students in the city and aging farmers in the desolate countryside. With its slow pace, Umbrella is not a sensational exposé of the dark side of China's growth. Du does make a strong statement about urban China leaving behind its rural past, but unlike other recent documentaries about Chinese factories such as China Blue and Mardi Gras: Made in China, sparse dialogue and a limited range of emotions in Umbrella do little to humanize the rich spectrum of characters he brings together in the film. For a video interview with Du Haibin, watch Joshua Fisher's very interesting Frontline/WORLD documentary, which discusses the work and challenges of documentary filmmakers in China.