The ShoeShiner's Journey

繁體中文China /2015 / 75 min
Director：LI Xiaofeng, JIA Kai


If someday on a noisy city street or a dusty road of a remote village in China, a battered van wrapped in slogans and red flags bumps into your eyes and high pitched songs of the 1960s explode in your ears, you should not think you are back to the 1960s. It’s Liu coming.
 
Liu used to hold a good position in the local government in Tibet. However, he quit his job and left his family twelve years ago. He went on a long, non-stop journey, traveling around China. With a broken van as his only companion, Liu dedicates himself to the great aspiration of establishing a university of international communism on his own. The irony is that the individualistic heroism of his behavior makes him politically provocative in a regime that advocates collectivism.
 
The shooting of the film started in 2007 and has lasted for seven years. The story unfolds as the protagonist’s journey goes on, both back to his traumatic past rooted in the Maoist era and forward to the obscure future of capitalist China. To a certain extent, Liu’s personal past and present are intimately intermingled with the past and present of this nation; their intersections constantly move forward like the spinning wheels of Liu’s van. 
 
 
 About the Director
 
LI Xiaofeng,  Documentary filmmaker. Obtained his Ph.D in Film Study in 2007 at ECNU. Now he is the associate professor of College of Art & Media, Tongji University, Shanghai.
 
Filmography
Gold Underground (138 min/2011) awarded the Grand Prize of Beijing Independent Film Festival 2012, officially selected by 2011 Copenhagen International Documentary film festival(CPH:DOX) and 2013 Yamagata International Documentary film festival（YIDFF）
 
My Last Secret  (90 min/2008) credited as Top Ten Chinese Documentary ofCIFF and awarded Grand prize of 2010 Chinese Collegial Association For Visual Art, officially selected by the 9th  JEONJU International Film Festival and the 15th Shanghai TV Festival
 
Pedaling Father (107 min/2007) NHK World HD
 
Walk in the Dark (90 min/2005) officially selected by the 20th Fribourg International Film Festival  and the 8th Taipei Film Festival
 
Book
1 Close reading of the film in the 20th century , Jilin Fine Art Press，2002；
2 Documentary Filmmaking， Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press，2006；
3 Direct cinema as a filming method, Tongji University Press，2012；
4 Poems: Fierce Floods and Savage Beasts in the Dream, 2015
 
 
 
JIA Kai, Documentary filmmaker. Associate professor of College of Art & Media, Tongji University, Shanghai.
 
Her major feature documentaries include Gold Underground, My Last Secret, Pedaling Father and Walk in the Dark, which have been widely selected and awarded by the international film festivals such as CPH:DOX(Denmark), YIDFF(Japan), JIFF(Korea), FIFF(Switzerland), TIFF(Taiwan), SIFF (China),etc
 
Her major books include: ‘A Review of American Classic Films’ and Translation work “Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography”
 
 

From the Director

All those years, Liu has put himself on a journey that would lead him to Beijing (the place where he would be crowned). This journey would take him to a past mixed with the memory of both glory and agony. Possibly, what happened in 1974 was only accidental. However, the tragedy is that he had been pushed off the train of his time by a giant invisible hand, falling down from the peak to the nadir. Suffering from the huge trauma, Liu struggles to pick himself up and catches up with his chariot. Unfortunately, the train had already roared away.

Liu, a Don Quixote of China, with all his faith and belief in the past seems more like a spiritual detector probing through the surface of Chinese society, making us face the present mentality of the Chinese people. 

In the rear mirror of Liu’s car, I also catch a glimpse of myself struggling for the ‘truth’ along the eight-year shooting journey. Maybe the truth lies nowhere but in the stubborn silence of the protagonist and the blankness of the narrated history. In the cracks of the fading ruins of a socialist utopia，a small voice from my self-reflection echoes.  

> 編輯（管理者使用）