Qianmen qian

A man calls the government from a phone box: he protests vehemently as his house has just been destroyed without his even being forewarned. He is told it was a mistake, that the workers, illiterate country folk, misread their instructions. The hutong made up old Beijing: small houses around a courtyard closed in by a grey brick wall, narrow alleys, a neighbourhood with small trades. Ordinary people, old Pekinese carrying the memory of the city–not the official memory of the Forbidden City, but the memory of a people. For them, the Olympic Games preparations are fatal. The last hutong of Qianmen, south of the Forbidden City, are disappearing under the excavators, so that a brand-new Beijing can welcome the Games. The expropriations are brutal, indemnities insufficient (based on 2001 house prices), protests are vain. The police keep watch, the press are nowhere to be seen. The hutong are nothing but rubble–a landscape of a bombed-out town. Long sequence shots show the inhabitants’ anger against the low indemnities and real-estate speculation, their anguish at not having a roof over their heads, the discontent of those re-housed in suburban apartment blocks where they know no one. An old man challenges the worksite foremen: “What will the tourists come to see when you’ve destroyed the hutong? The tower blocks they already have back home?” Too late, a wall decorated “old style” already hides the ruins. (Yann Lardeau)