WEIYENA – THE LONG MARCH HOME | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Judith Benedikt, Weina Zhao (2020, 96 mins)
This is a documentary not only about different cultures, but different socioeconomic backgrounds. Weina Zhao was born in 1986 and named after the city that she was raised in, Vienna. Her father moved there to give his family a better life, but Weina always has been drawn to China, where her three surviving grandparents live. Her grandparents came from very different backgrounds – rich and poor, cultured and countryside – and this retelling covers from before the Long March through to the present.
Zhao’s maternal grandparents met in Shanghai and were involved in cinema and theatre. Her great-grandfather on that side, Ying Yunwei, directed the country’s first feature film with dialogue and music. Both grandparents were imprisoned for four years during the Cultural Revolution, when Zhao’s mother was just 12 years old. Her paternal grandparents were peasants from the north, and her grandmother witnessed horrors with the Japanese occupation. Compounding all this is the fact that her father moved back to Beijing for business reasons, with Zhao and her mother only seeing him during the summer.
The filmmaker has definitely inherited her talent from her mom’s side: she knows when to be behind the camera and in front as a participant. It’s telling that Zhao feels more comfortable asking questions and getting answers which have to be translated than dealing directly in Chinese. Accordingly, there’s an intimacy and frankness about family and the government that one rarely encounters coming out of China, yet the blindness to abuse remains also.
Screened as part of Diagonale – Festival Of Austrian Film. Watch here
words RHONDA LEE REALI