New Castle

In this village located in Shanxi (the filmmaker’s home region), the coalmines are closing down one after another. This is a reality that the Chinese documentary cinema has often filmed, but Hongqi Guo, who spent two years shooting in Pudong (2008-2010), has rendered this social and geographic upheaval in its temporal dimension. Here, all is dying little by little, but no one is safe from sudden change, as in June 2008 when a hundred migrant miners had to leave: their mine closed as cleaner air was needed for the international visitors to the Olympic Games… This externally imposed time overlays the cyclic time of funeral ceremonies and ever-renewed games of mah-jong. Hongqi Guo also gives a spatial dimension to the change due in 2010, when the village will be moved lock, stock and barrel into the apartment blocks of the “new socialist countryside”. The inhabitants of these dynamite-scarred mountains bear the marks of the mines, like the young man disabled by a falling machine. Almost no one remains in this skeleton of a village except the elderly and children: many wives have left their husband, if the mine has not already killed them. The only compensation offered to the relatives of dead miners conveys the horrific beauty of the fool’s bargain in a fairy tale: a few kilos of coal dust.

Charlotte Garson