Filmmaker ZHANG Mengqi in conversation with Jie Li, Ford Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies, Harvard College Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Harvard University, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, John Cowles Professor of Art and Anthropology, Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard University.

This film is part of a three-part series presenting documentaries from China’s Caochangdi Workstation, a collective of documentary filmmakers and performance artists whose work explores memory, history, and everyday life through long-term, participatory projects.

Over the past thirteen years, ZHANG Mengqi has documented her father’s village in Hubei, China, as a repository of ancestral memory. The title of her ongoing series, “Self-Portrait,” suggests the degree of Zhang’s awareness of filmmaking as an act that always implies a vital and intersubjective relation between the artist and the world to which she is connected. This tenth film, 47 KM 2020, carries that recognition to its logical endpoint, as Zhang opted to install herself permanently in the village after the outbreak of COVID-19. Filmed between early January and late December 2020, and divided into chapters corresponding to the Chinese lunisolar calendars’ 24 solar terms, this vivid account of a year in the life of a stoic community, far removed from an urban-centered pandemic, unfolds with the simultaneous vastness and fine detail of a classical Chinese handscroll painting. Featuring some of the most authentic pastoral scenes in any film, as well as some of the most delightful dialogues with children, Zhang’s film is an immense accomplishment. Award of Excellence, 2023 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. —Museum of the Moving Image

About the director: ZHANG Mengqi was born in 1987. Filmmaker and choreographer, a founding member of Caochangdi Workstation’s Folk Memory Project. Mengqi has made eleven feature-length documentaries, known as the “Self-Portrait series.” Her films have been selected by Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival , Cinéma du Réel, Visions du Réel, BFI London Film Festival, etc. Her films Won the “White Goose Award” in DMZ International Documentary Film Festival; “BIFF Mecenat Award” in Busan International Film Festival; “The Jean Vigo prize for best Director”; “The Youth prize for best film” in Punto de Vista and “Best Feature Film” in Festival internacional de cine independiente de cosquín; “International Competition Award of Excellence” in Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.

Self-Portrait 47 KM 2020 (ZHANG Mengqi, 2023, 190 min, China, in Chinese dialects w/ Chinese & English subtitles, DCP)