Carving into the Heart with a Camera: On the 2026 TIDF 'Salute! Chinese Independent Documentaries' Programme
A decade ago, independent programmer Wang Pai-zhang was invited to write a commentary introducing TIDF's Chinese-language independent documentary programme. In the title of his essay, he referenced Taiwanese poet and activist Yang Kui’s (1906–1985) famous line, 'writing poetry upon the earth with a hoe', a reflection of Yang's rejection of grand revolutionary ambition in favour of simplicity and diligence in pursuing his artistic and political ideals. However, Wang refashioned the line as 'writing upon the earth with a hoe', indicating how never before had a country’s documentary cinema so faithfully yet so weightily upheld the meaning imbued by the label 'independent' — here was a crop of pioneering works continually exploring new possibilities while persistently recording everything taking place across the land.
While Wang was chiefly referring to China at the time, today his words might just as well apply to Hong Kong. Over the past decade, political forces have unsettled independent documentary practice in ways both overt and subtle, and one cannot help but lament how profoundly the creative landscape has changed. In this year's edition of TIDF, the programme 'Salute! Chinese Independent Documentaries' showcases a new configuration that has arisen in response to the times.
Among the Chinese works, Tan Mo employs a first-person perspective in Confessions of a Mole (2025), adopting a lively approach to confront issues such as generational difference, gender and women's rights. Chen Junhua's Farewell, My Nest (2026) quietly follows the fate of a community of migrant workers after their apartment building burned down and they were forcibly evicted. A product of the 'Folk Memory Project', Hu Sanshou's Xiangzidian Village: The Stage (2026) continues the director's documentation of a highway cutting through his hometown, presenting it as the construction of a spiritual stage. Cui Yi's To Alexandra (2025) similarly unfolds as a spiritual dialogue across time and space, revisiting how outsiders 'view' Tibetan landscapes. As for Li Luo's Air Base (2025), the film returns to Wuhan, interweaving the real and the imaginary to evoke emotional memories of people and spaces that have either faded away or remain unspoken in the wake of pandemic.
Turning to Hong Kong, Sammi Sum-yi Chiu's In a Minute (2025) reflects on 'time' under conditions of 'displacement'; Dorothy Cheung's As a Bird that Briefly Perches (2025) employs storytelling to meditate on the metaphor of taking root in foreign soil; and Rico Wong's Compact Disc (2025) and Chan Hau-chun's Map of Traces (2025) draw on personal recollections and archival materials to explore individual and collective traumas that resist articulation. Finally, Pan Lu's Island Fever (2026) reassembles Chinese state studio films produced from the 1950s to the 1980s, creating a collage of island-set narratives premised structured around class struggle; yet the location of this 'island', invested with so much imaginative meaning, is never clearly defined...
Together, these ten films constitute this year's 'Salute! Chinese Independent Documentaries' programme. They are, of course, only a selection and cannot represent the full scope of production. Yet compared with earlier documentaries characterised by direct critique, these works tend towards greater ambiguity, indirection and abstraction in both form and expression. Filmmakers today are increasingly adept at mobilising imagination, metaphor and absence to gesture towards a broader world.
Many people like to sigh nostalgically and say, 'Times have changed'. Indeed, the conditions of production have shifted, with documentaries moving from 'documenting the outside' to 'bearing witness from within'. Yet the spirit of documenting — and of documentary itself — has never changed; it remains constant, unadulterated. If ten years ago the guiding phrase was 'writing upon the earth with a hoe', today it might be described as 'carving into the heart with a camera' — allowing documentary cinema to radiate outwards from within, generating ever deeper resonances.
Translated by Cameron L. White
