By Isabella Tianzi Cai
Chi-hui Yang (right) and Kevin Lee discuss Disorder with audience at Museum of Chinese in America
Director Huang Weikai’s short film Disorder played in the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York City Chinatown last Friday evening, on August 12, 2011. It attracted students and people from the general public alike, who took an interest in contemporary Chinese documentaries. New York-based Chinese-language news source World Journal, the largest of its kind in North America, reported this event in an August 13, 2011 article.
World Journal reporter Du Yizhen writes in the article,”audience members were greatly amused by the scene where pigs loiter around on the Chinese highway.” The black humor of the film enabled western audiences to understand intuitively what is happening in China.
Chi-hui Yang, film scholar and former programmer of the San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival, and dGenerate Films Vice President Kevin Lee stayed with the audience after the film for a discussion. Yang examined how Disorder effectively exposes the problems brought about by China’s rapid economic development, and it depicts a myriad distortions resulted in ordinary people’s characters and dispositions.
In terms of the film’s artistic achievement, Yang said that it cleverly uses dialectical editing techniques to convey important messages. For example, the image of an abandoned baby in a dumpster is juxtaposed with the image of a well-fed wild crocodile. Such stark contrasts show up frequently in the film.
The article also highlights an exchange between Yang and an audience member on the issue of police brutality. Reporter Du writes, “a Caucasian American responded that for a nation that needs a police force to keep 1.3 billion people in order, the behavior revealed in the film doesn’t seem brutal at all.”