51-year-old Yu Guangyi is a man who occupies two very different realities. The first is tucked away in a self-built cabin deep within the Changbai mountains of northeastern China, where the protagonists of his documentaries have struggled for generations labouring in logging camps. The other is among the rest of the world: on distribution trips, at film festivals, even in a ‘seven-star’ hotel in Dubai, where he was invited for last year’s Dubai International Film Festival. ‘I couldn’t fall asleep,’ he tells Time Out. ‘It was 40°C and people were sunbathing on the beach; whereas here in the mountains, it’s -20°C.’
An everlasting affection for the snowy mountain forests of his hometown is what brought him back to Heilongjiang after years spent away. Once a successful wood-block print artist, Yu began filming documentaries at the relatively late age of 44. His journey began with Timber Gang (2007), which followed woodcutters on one last expedition before a 2005 environmental regulation banned the practice in China. Like Yu’s sudden turnaround in career, this was a film born of an impulsive decision.
‘I’ve never been trained in filmmaking, but once I heard about the ban, I almost felt instinctively compelled to make this film,’ he smiles. ‘I bought a digital video camera and spent only one afternoon learning some basic functions, then I just went back into the forest.’
Yu had left the mountains in his mid-twenties to study at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou before returning in his forties. He had originally been inspired by his father to travel away. ‘He also worked at the logging camp, but he was a cultured man,’ Yu recalls. ‘He used to tell us what was going on in other countries by pointing to a map of the world. Even now, I still take his map with me, going to film festivals all around the globe.’
Timber Gang won both the ‘Best Director’ and Jury Prize at the Seoul Film Festival and made Yu’s name on the circuit, setting the tone for his later works. But it is his sincere affection for the area that gives his subsequent films, Survival Song (2008) and Bachelor Mountain (2011), their raw power. Yu puts a human face on the often bleak world of mountain communities. Survival Song (2008) follows Xiao Lizi, a laid-off worker who exists as a vagrant, living at the abandoned logging camp and illegally hunting bears. ‘I bought him insurance with the prize money I got from the film festivals,’ says Yu. ‘Now he’s got a new job and life looks better.’
The director’s latest, Bachelor Mountain (2011), continues the human story by following another unemployed member of the logging community, who’s had a ten-year-long crush on his female neighbour. ‘When I was a kid, people came to the logging camp from the city, took photos and mailed them to us a few days later. Everyone was so happy. What I’m doing now is the same; I’m just a man who takes motion pictures of their lives.’
Despite his sentimental overtones, there are strong ambitions in Yu’s work. ‘Although documentaries are about realities, they are histories of the future,’ he claims. ‘What I’m doing will be appreciated in the long run, when these realities are nowhere to be found.’ But Yu rarely lets politics take a leading role. ‘What’s more important than politics is the cultural impact and human emotions that come with it – those things are eternal. I have to stand on a higher ground to beat the test of time.’
Choosing to take the ‘higher ground’ adds an important social depth to his films and allows him to explore the relationship between man and nature. When positioned in a difficult environment like the logging camp, Yu’s works offer a raw resistance to that which he finds missing in urban civilisation. ‘I was one of them from the start,’ he explains. ‘It’s the difficult surroundings in the logging farm that forced me to go somewhere else for a better life. Now that I’ve returned, I want to examine this force with an objective eye.’
If anything, Yu is a man who flies blind but sees clearly – maybe that’s the reason why he’s capable of sinking back into mountain life after walking countless red carpets. The routine can be humbling; it usually takes months following subjects just for the raw materials, he reveals, but the documentarist has no regrets.
‘I’m really jealous of those young independent directors who get to make films in their twenties. For me, I started too late, so I have to work harder to get things done. There are too many things in the woods to be documented, so I’m ready to spend the rest of my life doing it.’