Dongnan Chen, the director, editor, and producer of her first feature documentary Singing in the Wilderness, spent over six years in the small mountain village where the Miao ethnic group has lived for centuries. These humble and hardworking farmers and goat herders gather at church to praise God in their hymns sung by their choir. The film is the story of how they were discovered, exploited and had their beliefs undermined by officialdom. It may sound like a common story for many Western artists, but its particular setting in rural China makes this film unique. Dongnan Chen, who is based in China and a graduate of New York University’s film program, has had her prior work The Trail from Xinjiang aired on American TV and seen in festivals around the world, also a likely path for Singing in the Wilderness.
Life in the remote Miao village proceeds peacefully with its local choir, until Mr. Zhang, a local government propaganda minister, appears. He persuades them to sing in the outside world, while subtly undermining their cultural beliefs and traditions. Step by step we follow the Faustian deals the villagers fall prey to, in which fame and comfort are promised, as long as they abandon the religious content of their music and instead favor epic songs praising Mao and the Red Army, or sing shrill pop covers by Abba. The seductive Mr. Zhang and other Party officials find ways to monetize the talents and success of the Xiaoshuijing Farmers’ Chorus, and the village is bought to turn it into an “exotic tourist town,” in the words of a greedy developer. Tourists appear and dutifully photograph the peasants on display, and their songs become available on CDs sold in the market.
Rather remarkably, Dongnan Chen gained the trust of both the villagers and government officials, who gave her access to candid moments and intimate conversations. The people who reveal their innermost thoughts appear oblivious to the camera, which captures a wide range of emotions from devotion to disappointment, from joy to despair. The director covers weddings and births, as well as concert tours that take the shy farmers off singing in the most prestigious concert halls of Beijing and New York. Once back home, the fabulous sopranos rapidly exchange their songbooks for the plow and sickle, as their work routines demand of them. The editors do an excellent job on what must have been many hours of footage, refraining from inserting the filmmaker into the story, and only using interviews and the preacher’s diary as commentary. There are many telling details that show respect for the dignity of the farmer-musicians: the accordion player’s fingernails stained by the soil he has been digging; the star conductor selling cabbages at the food market; the villagers harvesting their crops or building their homes by hand.
Music, of course, plays an important part in the narrative, from Chad Cannon’s compositions to Handel’s Hallelujah. Traditional village songs in the A-Hmao language recall past massacres when the Han defeated the Miao in battle two thousand years ago. A wrinkled grandma sings of a ghost haunting the villagers in their sleep. The ghost we see, however, is not the specter that Marx announced in his Manifesto: it is a deformed, destructive form of state capitalism that does not tolerate dissent or differing beliefs, and sets out to methodically strip the Miao ethnic minority of their faith, lands, and ultimately their identity. Dongnan Chen seems to signal some optimism at the end when the villagers welcome back a young wife and her son who had moved away and gather once again at church to pray and sing together. Their lives seem more prosperous, their houses are more solidly built, but we are aware of the steep price they have paid for submitting to the state-sanctioned ideology. Singing in the Wilderness is a biblical allusion, and it is fully played out in the temptations and challenges the choir members must conquer in order to survive.
Director: Dongnan Chen
Producers: Dongnan Chen, Violet Du Feng, Qi Zhao
Cinematographers: Jisong Li, JK Huang
Editors: Emelie Mahdavian, Dongnan Chen
Music: Chad Cannon
Sound design: Xiaodan Li
Production Company: Tail Bite Tail Films (China)
World sales: Tail Bite Tail Films
Venue: International Film Festival of Rotterdam (Vision Scopitone)
In Mandarin, A-Hmao
98 min
