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DV moviemaking wins fans
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Huang Naili
THE small lecture hall in the He Xiangning Art Gallery was packed to the rafters with budding filmmakers eager to take in Lou Ye's lecture on DV (digital video) filmmaking on Saturday night.
Many of the listeners, fervent movie fans now falling under the spell of increasingly fashionable DV technology, had brought their DV cameras to record the lecture for posterity, or record their close encounter with Lou, one of the loosely knit group of Chinese directors called the Sixth Generation.
A young man was seen giving his girlfriend a last-minute course on the handling of his Sony DV camera. "DV filmmaking makes it possible for nearly anyone to affordably produce a film. I believe this is the ultimate dream of an enthusiastic super movie fan. You can not only see a movie but you can also try to make one," said the excited boy.
Lou, who said he mostly liked to tell romantic love stories with his handheld camera, showed the audience his new production: a short DV diary of life in Shanghai, his native city. Along with nine other directors in 10 port cities in the world, Lou was asked to take part in a project for this year's Rotterdam International Film Festival to tell stories of life in these cities.
Rather than speak from a podium, the 35-year-old director leaned against the stage, flashing a school-boy smile at questions from the audience as he gave the most frequent answers: "I don't know" and "I'm not sure".
Lou's fame in the movie industry was mostly built on the success of his Suzhou River, a low-budget 85-minute DV movie which won an award for him at last year's Rotterdam festival. Despite his award-winning success, he remains outside the establishment and his movies are not shown in public. However, the director said he was quite satisfied that his movies were available to fans in various movie clubs around the country.
Lou said the biggest attraction that DV filmmaking holds out for him is that he doesn't have to deal with censorship from the authorities. "I use my DV camera to express my concerns for people and things around me and I want to do it in the simplest way." Perhaps that is the highest goal of any form of filmmaking, whether it be giant Hollywood blockbusters or independent DV videos.
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