Chinas Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, USA, 2009, China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, USA, 2009, Documentary
I watched this film, as part of the Doco shorts selection at MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival) on 31 July 2010. It was an incredibly moving and emotive call for action, if only action at this stage could return the children lost to corruption, prejudice and bureaucratic inaction. As the synopsis explains: "For those grieving for the 70,000 who died in the Sichuan Province’s 2008 earthquake, justice is just one more thing they’ll have to live without." http://www.melbournefilmfestival.com.au/films/view?film_id=90221
Directors Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill work for DCTV, which is a community Television centre in New York. The film captured the sorrow and pain caused by the Sichuan Province earthquake that occurred on May 12 2008. However, more painful than this natural disaster was the corruption and inaction of the government that led to the deaths of 10 000 children that were killed when their badly built school rooms collapsed and who were then left under the rubble in the aftermath. For days afterwards they were trapped and slowly dying while no government rescue operations were instigated by the local government organizations. The corruption, cover-ups and the painful obsession by the government to be more concerned about their international reputation than that of the parents who lost their only children was at times difficult to watch. I was astounded by the difference in what occurred in China and what may occur in my own country if the similar disaster was to unfold. I thought of Stuart Diver and his burying in rubble in Thredbo in a landslide in 1997 and how for days rescue teams carefully searched for survivors, which after 67 hours Stuart was found and brought to safety. Then I listened to the father who told of his primary school age only daughter (due to China’s one child policy) phoning him from the rubble and begging him to come and rescue her and to call the fire brigade. She was not rescued, as there were no operations conducted by the government at all. I began to consider that as the victims involved were villages and farmers they were treated as not deserving the same respects and rights, the wealthy classes in the city might receive. After the earthquake, the government told them to take care of the situation themselves. One mother explained how she dug her child out at 3 am in the morning and she tried to carry her deceased daughter home on the back of their motorbike, until it broke down, leading them to carrying her home on foot. They buried her in their own land. I could not help but be disgusted with this treatment and the resulting conclusion that no follow up investigation or final report was ever given to the parents, despite them marching for hours to protest and beg for an investigation to occur, which on camera the officials agreed to.
Hence the documentary was covering a very controversial and political issue that I was not aware of and that disheartened me greatly. The state corruption that led to the buildings being built to such a low standard was devastating enough, but to see how the government then offered the parents an extra $8000 for their loss, if they agreed to not bring China into disrepute was horrifying. I could not help but wonder how the farmers and villages all over the world are given less human rights than people who live in the city and this concerned me greatly. Where did this prejudice and ill treatment stem from? Where do the government officials and wealthy citizens in the large cities all over their world think their own rice and other farming produce comes from? Why would these people deserve any less than anyone else in their country? And if the government (as seen in the documentary) was so concerned with how their international counterparts would perceive them, why did they not take the appropriate action after this dreadful incident and show the world that they do care about their people, in particular their children and in the very least have an appropriate investigation into the cause and resulting inaction of this ‘unnatural disaster’ in the Sichuan Province.
The documentary was filmed on the go in the early aftermath of this disaster and I would love to know how the American filmmakers even had permission to film, which I will follow up on. The cinematography was fitting with the cinema verite style it was shot in and it goes to show you that the story alone can be more powerful than any carefully designed set. The long close ups of the mourning parents was very emotive. The opening scene, before the title of the film or any detailed description of the subject matter, was an emotionally charged beginning. The young child who had somehow survived in one of the school buildings that had collapsed and killed all of her friends visited the site with her parents. She cried and wished her friends good luck in their journey.
I left the cinema with a mixture of emotions. I was disturbed with what I had witnessed, I was grateful for cinema and its power of being able to spread these stories and make people aware of the pain and suffering people all of the world go through in our very different lives; and I left bewildered and concerned that there was nothing I could do to ensure something like this does not happen again. Except of course to continue to make films myself and somehow contribute to at least making people aware of people’s actions and perhaps one of these days the people responsible will start to worry more about their people, than their reputation that only stems from their ill treatment of their people to begin with.
You can buy a copy of this film here.
