‘Til Madness Do Us Part

Feng Ai

DIRECTOR: Wang Bing   COUNTRIES: Hong Kong SAR China, France, Japan   YEAR: 2013  LANGUAGE(S): Mandarin Chinese   SUBTITLES: English   RUNNING TIME: 228 min  

SECTION: International Forum 2015

SYNOPSIS

Wang Bing is the Ai Weiwei of documentary: He too criticizes the system in his art of monumental dimensions. A psychiatric institution in Yunnan shows the naked existence of those excluded by China’s delusional modernization drive. A very tender masterpiece of precise observation. Cinéma vérité!

If pictures could stink, these certainly would. For almost four hours, Wang Bing observes people vegetating in a closed institution. Men and women live here separated on two different floors – their offense is either unknown or nonexistent – as is their future. Their situation is absurd, in the term’s most painful existential sense. Locked up indefinitely, stuck between exposed walls and a fenced-in courtyard, their life consists of repetitive, pointless activity. The rooms are bare, there is filth everywhere and there is nowhere to retreat. Left practically to themselves, the inmates organize their daily lives – asleep, awake, asleep. From time to time, wardens dressed in white overalls come to distribute food and tranquilizers and sometimes they might take away a rebellious newcomer for a while until he too is willing to tolerate his daily life lethargically. Thanks to his camera, Wang Bing manages the feat of becoming one with the inmates. This is the only way he can observe and document and make visible the brazenness of a society that stores people shamelessly like waste.

WANG BING
Born in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China, in 1967, Wang Bing is one of the foremost contemporary documentary filmmakers. His films are about important moments in Chinese history, focusing special attention on the small and great stories of those who personally suffer the tragic consequences of specific historic events. He began his career as a photographer at the Department of Photography of the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts (1992) and at the Department of Cinematography at the Beijing Film Academy (1995). He made his debut as a film director in 2001 with the documentary WEST OF THE TRACKS, a project conceived at an epic scale, which tells the story of the most ancient of Chinese industrial districts, Shenyang: the final version is a trilogy that lasts a total of 9 hours, transformed into the fascinating saga of a people and a nation. 2010 Bing had his first film in competition at the Venice Film Festival: THE DITCH – a feat he repeated with ’TIL MADNESS DO US PART in 2013.

FILMOGRAPHY
West of the Tracks (1999-2003), Brutality Factory (2007), Fengming, A Chinese Memoir (2007), Crude Oil (2008), Coal Money (2008), The Ditch (2010), Three Sisters (2012), Alone (2012), ’Til Madness Do Us Part (2013), Father and Son (2014), Traces (2014)

PRODUCERS: Louise Prince, Ying Liang   CAMERA: Liu Xianhui, Wang Bing   EDITORS: Adam Kerby, Wang Bing   MUSIC: Zhang Mu 

PRODUCTION: Y.Production, Moviola, Rai Cinema   WORLD SALES: Anne-Sophie Lehec, Asian Shadows