 This is like the first time I showed this TVR version. I had to cut down from 80 minutes. If you're curious, if you want to find out more about this film, watch screening this 80 minute full feature version of the DC Independent Film Festival, 5 PM on Saturday. So tell your friends. All right, advertisements over. Well, thanks, Hal. I really, really enjoyed it. This is my second time watching it. I did watch the 80 minute one before. You had to suffer a second time. No, I'd really enjoyed it. But first, let's just make a quick round of introductions before launching. I hope you all enjoyed that movie very much. What an achievement, Hal. OK. Whatever. It really hats off. I mean, you were following it for such a long time, and you managed to capture so much of what was happening three years later in all their dreams and aspirations. But before we just launch that, let's just quickly say who we are and why we're up here, aside from Hal. Maybe I'll just start with introductions. My name's Mae Fong, and I'm moderating this talk. I was a Wall Street Journal, China correspondent. And I lived in Beijing for several years, and I'm actually writing a book about the one-child policy. So I'm very, very interested in Hal Wu's movie and what it shows about the future of China. And the lovely lady on your right there is Rebecca McKinnon. Rebecca was also a New America fellow several years back, and she is now a director at the Digital Rights Foundation project. But more to the point, relevant for our discussion, Rebecca also spent some time growing up in China. She was actually there when they first launched the one-child policy in the 1980s. Rebecca also worked in China in the 1990s when China's economy was just taking off, and she was the CNN Bureau chief. And so she has seen quite a lot firsthand of some of the changes that have happened. And of course, last but not least is Hal Wu, who has created this wonderful gem of production. Hal was actually started off as a molecular biologist. And so that's a long way off from making movies. But you've made several really interesting documentaries showing modern China in all its different aspects. And in addition to that, you also had a different hat at one point working on China's internet growth. So I guess I just wanted to start off very quickly in putting this. What made you choose this topic and this particular show? I mean, I love it. I think it's great. But I was just wondering what made you decide to do it. I think, for me, I was a biologist first. And I was working in the internet industry, in business. But I always want to tell stories. And particularly for me, after living in the US for 12 years when back to China 2004, the China I saw and the China I read in the media seems that there's a gap. China is very complex as a Chinese. I know that. So I just want to tell China in the context of the globalization of cross-culture communication migration. So that's why I did my first film about Chinese-American, quote unquote, going back to China. What's their experience in China? What they saw in China? For this one, I guess I was looking for my second film, featureless documentary. So I was looking for a subject. And sometimes, as documentary filmmakers, you want to explore certain directions. But you don't necessarily get the right character or get the right access. So I just heard a random chance through a friend that a Broadway producer is really working with Central Academy of Drama, which is China's own fame school, to try to help launch really musical industry in China. So one of the first projects that we're doing, they were actually doing two projects. One is that they were bringing a touring production of Aida to Beijing and Shanghai. And then the second production they're doing is this Chinese language production of fame. So I was like, which one should I follow? Which one's more interesting? Obviously, the young kids, right? And also, fame being such a quintessential American concept, self-made person, go after a dream at Anacar. So how does it translate in China, in today's China? So that was what got me interested in exploring the subject. Oh, well, I thought it was a great platform for exploring because of all the reasons. What we know from growing up in people in China is that, especially from the change from the Kaifeng opening up period to that was the emphasis on safety and stability. And then suddenly you transmute to this whole generation where people are chasing after something so ephemal as fame. I was curious, Rebecca, what did you think? You grew up, you spent some time in China, you knew something of the generation at that time. Did you think this was a hopeful movie or a sad movie? It was an incredibly hopeful movie. And of course, what's so wonderful about this movie is that you relate so much to these characters and you see how much similarity between their aspirations and aspirations of young kids here, which is why that story, which is an American story, actually translates so well to those kids' lives. But it's interesting to kind of, I thought, how did just such a fabulous job of juxtaposing this generation with their parents' generation? Their parents are closer in age to me. And so I was in China in primary school in 79 to 81 and I imagine those parents were probably born in the 60s. I was born in the very late 60s but I imagine they were probably more early to mid 60s most of those parents and their lives were very hard. They grew up through the Cultural Revolution and quite a number of my Chinese friends and my best Chinese friends also grew up through the Cultural Revolution, which was a time when people were being persecuted for being artists. And in fact, when I was there in 79, I was 10 and I played the violin because I had the American, the kind of Midwestern version of a tiger mom. So my parents arranged for me to take some lessons at the Central Music Academy at that time, which is sort of the classical music version of the school, equally competitive. But at that time, because China just opened up, there was no rock music. Kids were, people were still wearing Mao suits. There were no tall buildings. There were very few cars on the streets in Beijing. Nobody wore jeans. It was a very different kind of society. It just opened up. The teachers at this school had just brought their classical music back out of hiding because during the Cultural Revolution, classical musicians were beaten to death for being feudal bourgeois. And so there was this generation of people who had no contact with the West in efforts to have contact culturally with the West were completely verboten for a period of 20 years during that time. And people were just emerging from that in 79. And these parents of this generation had come of age at a time where nothing was certain and you didn't know when they were having their children in the late 80s, those parents still didn't know whether this kind of reform and opening was gonna last. You couldn't count on stability. Well, that's right. But these kids, it's very funny because China, they know. They have no memory, no personal experience of how China was before it began to open up to the outside world. And haven't, they still struggle economically, all kinds of things, the sort of fundamental how the society works and what is considered good and what is considered bad. And what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do are just the fact that you could actually have some control over your career. Up through the 80s, during these kids, their teachers generation, they had no choice over what job they were allocated when they graduated from college. They had absolutely no choice. And so it's a very, very huge contrast. And I thought you did a lovely job going back to these kids' homes and so on and showing this contrast that these kids are living in a completely different China than their parents grew up in. That was one of the great strengths of the piece too because on one hand, you're seeing like, okay, this could be like you say, these are almost like American concepts. Be who you wanna be, seek out, make that, strike out for the great white way. These are self-determination. But on the same hand, if you were to make this movie in America, I doubt you would have such a strong presence of the parents in it, the way that you would here. I mean, what mother would travel all the way to New York and cook meals for the son? Is that millennial's parents sound to you? They can be, there's Tiger Monthong, what kind of race, you know, racism, ethnicity. The 1980 movie, I remember the Jewish mother was like really prominent in that film and I love that character. But I guess, maybe I was wondering if one of the questions raised, because one of the big questions that came about when China started this, the world's biggest demographic experiment in 1979 was, well, what is this one child generation gonna look like? How are they gonna shape the China of the future? And there were various theories which are still sort of being tested out. One of them being like, these children will, you know, have never seen the kind of want their parents have and they've had so much lavish to them and therefore they're gonna push for greater change and have greater demands about political openness maybe perhaps, constant economic growth, all sorts of things that their parents did not have the choices, great choices, you know, with great choices, it's almost bewildering. And the other theory which is in a way is like some of these themes are hinted at in the movies, they are too coddled, they are somehow crippled by the sense of perhaps too much expectations, too much sheltering, not enough hard knocks, that somehow this is not going to be both well for the future, that they can't take the hard knocks, they can't take the rejections, they don't want to be the B cast. Yeah. And I'm sort of wondering, the movie kind of, to me, left it open-ended, where it was at and I'm just wondering what your thoughts on that, path A, path B, cast A, cast B kind of comes in. I think everybody has different perspectives, you know, for example, as a filmmaker, I would, my goal was to tell a good story. I want to hint all the conflicting views from, you know, from the teacher's point of view, from the kid's point of view and let the audience come up with something they can think about. Individual as a person, I guess my view is actually more optimistic. I mean, there are, this generation has so many problems, but at the same time, as I was finishing up this film, I was doing research online, I was doing research about the millennial generation in America. I was like, wait, all the criticism that we have towards the American millennials are also very similar to what you would say of the one child generation in China, very callow, too demanding, don't want to stay with their jobs for long, right? So, I mean, so in a way, so that's why in the end I tend to focus on the positive, which is this kids, unlike their parents' generation, they are experimenting with individualism, you know, like Chen Lei, the character. Regardless of what she chose in the end, she was like, I want to be a big star, super star. I mean, very few people could have saved that a lot of generations ago, but now she's like, I want to be an American idol. And then you see other kids, Fei, the young kid who has the poet father, he really struggles, you know? He's like, I don't know what I'm going to do. I mean, a lot of the wonderful sound that got cut out from this version, in the original version, you hear him say, like, throughout my life, I've always been pressured into doing dancing, acting, I never know what I wanted to do. It's always about making my parents proud, right? But at the same time, you see him really hustles that I want to make it, I want to make it. So these are the, to me, the generation of shifts that's happening, that these kids are demanding to be like me, the me, myself, and I. So they're becoming the me generation. So people will say that's a bad thing, but I think for China, because we have all these conformist pressure, being me is a wonderful thing. But anyway, that's just my personal point of view. But what do you think about that? Yeah, the other thing that really kind of, you know, I think what's striking was just the money that a few of these kids have. Check out the sneaker boy. Yeah, yeah. And just the real class divide amongst the different students there. I mean, in 79, everybody was equally poor. Equally poor. And it was, except for the, and it was, you know, there were a few kind of sons and daughters of officials who had connections, but they were poor too, you know, but they just had connections. But now it's like the cash. The one percent. And the contrast that kind of highlights, I think that was quite striking to me as well. To me, the thing that struck me was when I watched this, and I was wondering how many, these kids were actually in some sense outliers for Chinese youth as a generation to want to be movie stars. It's still a minority kind of thing. I mean, like what we read now today is like a huge overwhelming percentage of Chinese children now want to enter the civil service. Safe for profession, benefits assured. And because of the weight of the issue of the six I's going into one, they were the spoiled emperors with all these, but at the same time now, time is reversing. They are getting older and their parents are gonna get older too. And they are gonna have to take care of those parents, which is why they're making, I think most I think are making the choices, I'm gonna have to save career. I'm going to, I have so many old people to take care of. I'm going to get married early because my parents expect me to. I'm going to have that child, grandchild because my parents expect me to. So to me, that was the flip side of what I see and I celebrate what your film does and the kind of people it has. Because to me, it feels to me like the minority and not the majority of... I agree, I absolutely agree. These are the 1% of Chinese school population and they are by no means the statistically representative. I think what I'm trying to do is trying to find some themes that's happening in China. Obviously as a filmmaker, you have to have a point of view. So I chose the point of view, which is three years later, that's still sort of fighting. Most of us are still trying to figure out what the future could be. And... But I've screened this film in Beijing and young kids loved it. I mean, despite a lot of young kids might be going to other profession, but they have their aspirations, they have their desire. They want to be like them. They want to be like Chen Lei. Say, I want to go to America, even though Chen Lei didn't come to America, he's the rich kid who ended up coming here. But yeah, it's this idea. This is the spark of what did Mao say, that the fire can, can the grassland, whatever it is. I'll forget that one. Anyway, Mao said something, you know, like confessions. Mao said a lot of things. Yeah. How was the reaction? And I'd love to open this to the audience at some point, to sort of gauge the reaction here and sort of compare and contrast with how that was different from, say, the reaction in China. But I was just wondering before we do that, whether, what were some of the things, reactions in China when you screen a movie there that perhaps struck you as unusual or different from what you expected? I think the first, the biggest surprise was that I make this film with the intention of explaining China, the young generation. You want to tell people also China why young people, young kids are like in China. I wasn't expecting Chinese people to like this because that's what they see every day other than the song and dance, which is relatively new. But surprisingly, I found it really resonated well with young people there. Like I said, I think this emotional angst, the young kids that are feeling so much expectation but at the same time being pressured by everything that they cannot fully express themselves, that angst that I think maybe it finds a lot of resonance in China. And right now we're discussing with a couple of national broadcasters about broadcasting the film. So I was nicely surprised, it was a great surprise to show this in China. You know, one of the things I was curious about was in the film is because I've been reading a lot of social scientist research into what this one child generation means. And one of the things I read was, you know, there was one of these social studies recently done by Australian universities where they did some psychological tests and their initial assessment was that the one child generation tends to be much more risk averse and also less prone to sharing. Then the previous generation before that. So do you think that that's true in the context of what you've been talking about in your film and in people you've met? Yeah, I mean, I didn't exactly look at this data. I definitely see, but for me, because as a filmmaker I'm more looking at the characters and sometimes the anecdotal evidence rather than statistic evidence. So I definitely can see from anecdotally and based on characters, there's the comes in both sides. I think it obviously has something to do with growing up with no sibling. You don't have to compete at all to get your parents' attention, right? You automatically get it. It's a lot. It's the exclusive attention on you. And secondly, you've been getting everything. They don't have to do anything. The parents just give, give, give. So that contributes to this, like, I'm just waiting. I can't work a little bit, but if I hit some bump, I'm gonna withdraw. In that regard, I think that's true. But at the same time, I know we're not supposed to do one hand on the other hand, but China's being so big, the generation is like, that generation alone is 240 million, right? We'll talk about the post-90s generation. That's another 200 million there. So within these millions, the guy was fighting a million that's really going out there. When I was working in the internet industry in Beijing, my kids, the young kids I hired, they're like, I don't like my boss. I'm gonna quit. What are you gonna do? I'm gonna travel for a month. I'm gonna come back for a job. Like, that would drive me nuts. It's like, don't you wanna do a career planning? No, I can't find a job, I'm okay. So you can see that's like, I don't know whether that's risk averse or risky because they're just like, I'm gonna do whatever I wanna do, yeah. That's interesting, the issue. But then the other hand, there's always the parental expectations which play to it. And one of the big issues is marriage, right? One of your chief characters, Chen Lei, was a very attractive and engaging character. She's wrestling with, should I get married? Should I pursue a career? And I think if you took that in American context, very few kids upon graduating from college would start thinking very seriously, I need to get married or not. Oh, there's a lot who do. Oh, yeah. Well, who here wants to get married? Well, I don't know, I mean. Let's open this up to the audience because I always find that to be really fascinating. Does anybody have some thoughts and comments on how they found the film and in questions they might wanna raise? This is actually a question, actually. It seemed to me when I was watching the film that I kept on forgetting that these kids are in their 20s because they seemed to be acting quite young, like teenagers. I was wondering if that was kind of a component of being in drama school and that's just the environment of the college or if that was like more of a cultural thing or what were your take on that? I will probably, anybody else in that generation can answer here because based on my observation, even like Chinese in their late 20s working in a corporate environment, when they're outside of the office, sometimes they behave like this way too. Like with friends, with friends and family, that can be really relaxed. I think that's, that being in drama school in such a close environment, spending four years with only 30 classmates, that contributed to it, that definitely contributed to it. But I think compared to the American young people at the same age, Chinese people, I think they're more within their own circle. And again, it's down to the family structure, right? That's right. They're looking for extended family outside because they don't have siblings. So when they have friends, when they have cousins, they really treat them like family, so they behave really good. Yeah, because I think your comparison of norm is the American structure, which is actually very different. I grew up in Malaysia. I worked in China and then I came to the States. So grad school, I also taught many Chinese students as well as American students here in universities. And one of the main things I started with, the American structure pushes you to independence at a very early age. One of the first things you do as a self-determination is to drive at the age of 15. Now that changes your whole mindset because you can go somewhere, you have power over where you go. Your average American teenage, Chinese teenager, does not maybe get a driver's license until well into their 20s. Now that whole changes the whole mindset. I can go anywhere. So this is the American mindset. I get a car, I can drive, I can hit the open roads. Chinese mindset is I get into a bus or subway stop when I'm driven somewhere. Like when his mom moved to Beijing, I spent just taking care of them. Like taking care of early teens, right? Like young kids. They've been cut off. But that's not unique. I know a lot of college students, their parents moved to near their colleges, taking care of them. That's happening in the U.S. as well. Sometime when they come here for grad school, the parents will come to by our apartment like in New York City. But also I think there was what is interesting about your movie was the play between school and a much more fluid structure of stardom, right? The pursuit of stardom is not linked to the certain kind of things you go to school. You pass exams and you graduate and bingo, you're a star. But that is the very structured way that Chinese school education has been for thousands of years. And you pass exams, you go to the next step. And Chinese teenagers, we all know, struggle through the Gaokao, which is like the SATs a billion times over. The pressure is so high. Yeah, with all those scores on that blackboard. And the expectation is if you made it, then you made it. You do it. So for them to do it and try and pit their hearts against stardom, which isn't a question of graduating in the right school, even though they are in the right school, but there's no guarantee, right? And that's the heartbreaking thing for some of these kids because they're so disappointed. You know, they're like, I went through this amazing school and why am I not a star? Yeah, exactly. The lady at the back with the hand raised. Great film, I really loved it. I'm curious about, how did you get this amazing access and how did you choose the characters in the film and what was the process like working with your editor, Jean, to really shape the story? Oh, that's a lot of questions. So first of all, getting access without the American introduction, I would never have gotten that access because in China, any state affiliated organization, the super secretive, right? You cannot allow a film crew there roaming on a monitor. But then because the American producer introduced me, they're like, oh, he's a guest of the American producer. We cannot say no to Americans. So in that way, I was really lucky. And your second question was, how should I choose this five? Choose the five character? Because very early on, we know we want to follow Chen Lei, who really like, I want to be superstar. And Fei, who's very articulate about the family pressure he's struggling. And then we build around these two characters because Wu Heng kind of represents this kind of coddle, very talented looking. He should make it in the system, but he's not making it. So in that way, that's typical of China, too, because he's like, people from my family background would not make it in China show this. He lost the battle, like, once you get into this college, right? So that's kind of typical of the cynical Chinese. So he's a very cynical Chinese, but, and then the other two, obviously as contrast to Fei as Wu Heng and Chen Lei, you know, the rich kids, right? So the three main characters followed up, all poor kids, somehow just happened. And they didn't get a cast, but the other two are rich, they got a cast. But in terms of working with jeans, like I said, like a filmmaker recently said, filming a documentary is like selective vacuuming. You just vacuum, you know, as much as you can. But films are made in editing room. I mean, in the editing room, working with jeans, now I know who you are. And then it's really about finding the theme, highlighting the theme, because there's so many ways you can shape the story. I can make this about Americans coming to China, China doesn't understand America, cross culture differences. I can make this about corruption in the school system. You know, the kids, I hinted on the kids that kids in school, you know, I can make this about an underdog story. But then we decided to say, okay, based on the footage we have, we want to tell a story about this young generation. There are struggles. We have room for two more questions, I think. Time is up. Could you talk a little bit about the China's musical industry? I mean, these kids are majoring in musical. Is there any big changes in the past years? Is there a new major in the academy? Thanks. Music industry. Okay, that's a difficult one. And there's a great Atlantic, actually a red article around this film talking about the music industry in China. Really briefly, Mama Bi had a sold out performance, sold out around in Shanghai. So that's a good start. In terms of really for Chinese people to understand the musical form, our form, it's gonna take, I don't know how many decades, at least another one or two decades. And then for China to have really the talent, the talent to write good musicals and perform a great musical, it's gonna take another two decades because we all hear about China talking about innovation. And these kids, you know, they have ways to go. They have ways to go to meet the Broadway standard. Well, I also think that one of the things China will probably need to develop is the audience, right? The audience at first. So he's gonna sit through the thing and not rush for the... That's right. But I'm sorry to say we're run out of time entirely, but you guys have been the great audience that we want China to develop. So if you have any further questions, I'm sure how would be happy to talk to you after this. Yeah, we'll be all set. And we can get drinks. And drinks, yeah. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.