[Overseas Chinese Daily reporter Guan Liming, Oct. 5, New York News] Jessica Kingdon, a documentary about the reality of contemporary industrial production and consumerism in China, "ASCENSION", filmed by Jessica Kingdon, a chinese-American female director in New York, will be officially released this Friday after winning the best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film is distributed by MTV Documentary Films.
The title and shooting method of "Sigh on the Stairs" are different from ordinary films. The title of the film, "Sigh on the Stairs", comes from a poem written by the director's great-grandfather Zheng Ze (1882-1920) lamenting the homeland in 1912. Zheng Ze is a native of Changsha, Hunan Province, and was a member of the Nanshe Political Group during the Xinhai Revolution. The content of the film "Sighing on the Stairs" is a plot-free and non-narrator-free approach, which presents the scenes of consumer goods production workshops in northern and southern China to the audience like a display of goods, and also shows scenes of people working, living and consuming in different social classes.
The film includes food processing factories, garment factories, rubber adult products and robot production and assembly workshops, as well as training scenes for bodyguards, hotel service personnel, and luxury consumption scenes for the rich. Director Kimton said she and the crew spent three years traveling to 51 factories and companies across northern and southern China to film where workers were engaged in production, training or marketing.
Kinton said her purpose in making "Climbing the Stairs" is "not to provide answers about the moral value of the Chinese system, but to draw the audience's attention to the universality of the industrial creation and consumption process, to make people reflect on who really benefits from industrial production." In any country, those at the bottom of the production chain are often not the beneficiaries of these productive activities. Through this film, I hope to show the most basic elements of the social system, individual workers and consumers, to the audience. ”
In all these different classes, Kinton said, she was most drawn to moments of humanity that people exuded from time to time in their busy jobs — a female worker in a plastic bottle factory stopped to drink water from a thermos, a stern bodyguard coach showed rare tenderness to his pet goat, and a housekeeper who was undergoing rigorous training tried to take a nap in a quiet corner — moments that revealed the warmth and spontaneity that prevailed behind the vast, dehumanizing industrial machine.
In addition, the film also roughly divides all scenes into three categories in structure - industrial workers at the grassroots level, various service industry practitioners at the middle level who aim to cater to people's consumption, and luxury consumption scenes of various rich people at the top.
The director said the original idea for the film stemmed from her experience in 2014 when she traveled to Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, to shoot the small commodity city there. Born into an American family with a Jewish father and a Chinese mother, she did not know much about China, but was later influenced by her brother, who spoke Chinese and lived in China for several years, she began to study Chinese culture, and in the past few years, she has made a number of short documentary films on China, including the award-winning short film "Commodity City". The 97-minute "Ascent" concentrates on her shooting over the past few years.
Kington received his bachelor's degree in film from Columbia University and a master's degree in media studies from the new university. She was named one of the 40 outstanding directors under the age of 40 (40Under40) by the New York Documentary Film Festival last year.
