 I have to say it feels a little bit like a fire hose as all these stories continue to come out that are demonizing China. And even, you know, with our success, our Kamala letter, thank you all of you for signing it. The language from our Kamala letter telling the Biden administration about the seriousness of hate and lies around China driving racism. One of the first things he came out with is like we've got to stop, you know, we've got to work on this issue and stop the Asian racism while still going after China. We haven't fully seen the plan yet, but too many of the appointees continue to not have a friendly attitude towards China. So thanks for your engagement. We have a lot to do. We have to change this narrative that they're getting in that, you know, constantly trying to affect and it's really interesting to watch them try to co-opt our narrative. You know, I reported a bit ago that John Kerry was inside the Biden administration saying, you know, we have to be friends with China if we're gonna really be able to save the planet together. And unfortunately, he's just come out which obviously were words put in his mouth because we know he was the one fighting. He said, we can fight, we can fight the planet fight and China at the same time. Just like, whoa, amazing what happens when you get inside of the Beltway and the strange thinking of those people in power. But our job is to grab the narrative and tell a different story that no, we shouldn't be hating on China. No, we won't share lies about China because we need cooperation, healthy competition with China for our lives and for the planet and to stop a possible nuclear war. So today, I have a storyteller. Peter Gettels is an Emmy Award winning director, producer and cinematographer. Currently he's the co-creator, producer, director of the long running PBS series on science and philosophy called Closer to the Truths. Now in its 20th season, this is the guy they decide to censor. Gettels worked in China on several major projects including a series director, producer of China's challenges with creator, host and writer, Robert Lawrence Tune. In 2013 and 2018, China's challenges won first prize from the China News Awards and second prize in 2015. The series won an LA Emmy in 2016 and Tully Awards in 2017 and 18. In addition, Gettels has recently completed this feature documentary Voices from the Frontlines, China's War on Poverty, which he co-produced with the Kuhn Foundation and PBS SoCal in association with China Global Television Network. This is the action we've all been engaged with, the censoring of Peter's films. So Peter, I wanna welcome you today and thank you so much for joining us. And I also wanna tell you that we just received today photographs of many pages of people from the Chinese community in San Francisco who hand wrote notes to PBS. You have a lot of fans and I promise I will share with them that their gratitude and that they're fans. So, you know, let's start with, here you are an award-winning director. How does PBS get away with censoring your film? Well, that's a good interesting question. Let me just give you one little sideline. The series I do is called Closer to Truth. There's no flaw. Because that'll kind of mess the whole concept up. So let's do it. Because I mean, the truth is a little bit, yeah. But there is close to truth. But nonetheless, yeah. So how does PBS get away with censoring it? I mean, here's the experience that we had. I've made a lot of films globally. I made several series as Jody pointed out in China. And we created these two series in China's challenges with the Shanghai Media Group in 2012, 2016. And those were films that took up pretty big issues in China. They took up issues about politics. They took up issues about reform. They explored Xi Jinping's thought. They really explored some, you know, controversial topics. We had a partner in China. We worked with Chinese crews. And those films were broadcast, as you pointed out, on PBS, SoCal. And we never got any complaints or anything. I mean, we won an Emmy. They were popular of those series. And it was a really, you know, sort of a tribute to the fact that, you know, our position in trying to explain China and trying to understand what's going on in China from the inside hasn't changed. Didn't, it's very concomitant with what we did while we were working on the China's challenges series. And we took it to the next step with this very big series, either in the series, this very big feature and television program called China's More on Poverty Voices in the Frontline. And you know, nothing, we didn't change the way we work. We didn't change our perspective. And yet the world changed, the zeitgeist changed. And I think that's the important thing to remember is that, you know, we find ourselves in the multitude of being subject in a way to current political trends and habits. Now, wanted to note that what we did is we took a very particular position while we were filming the China's More on Poverty film, the Voices in the Frontline. And the position was I decided as a director, let's try and do it in a narrative way. We didn't want to wade into a controversy. We wanted to really get into the grassroots. We wanted to film in an observational narrative way in which what carried the story were the people themselves. And, you know, we did work with Chinese crews and when working in China with crews, they were very, very talented crews. My DOP and my unit directors were absolutely wonderful. You know, we were able to get a really good access. We spent a lot of time in small villages. I mean, we were in the beginning in that village called Hainan, where we were with the young cadre who committed two years of his life to living in a very, very poor village to lift people out of poverty. We tracked the experience through populations of villagers being moved from one location to another, which was controversial and they talk about the controversy. We explored the very interesting procedure that the Chinese government put in place, which was to actually try and root out corruption. They're aware that a system like this, it's such a massive endeavor, could be very much subject to corruption. And so they would send groups of students from one province to another province to double check and to really look into what was going on. And we also explored the very integral five layers of kind of integration that allowed such an endeavor to happen. And that was that, you know, this is very much a Chinese approach. And we really thought that the world could benefit from seeing how the Chinese approach such a massive endeavor. They would break the world down to sort of their world into five different stages. They were, I always get them confused, but it was, you know, they had the provincial level, which was the top level, municipal level. They had the county level, township, village all the way down to the grassroots. Each different level was responsible for the level above, responsible for the level below. And in that way, integrated a whole national effort to try and create this poverty alleviation process. Now, when the film came out, you know, as I said, the atmosphere had changed and somehow, you know, some found it fit to say that you're not allowed to say anything positive about China. We weren't saying anything positive or negative. We were just exploring how the Chinese government, how the Chinese people tried to eradicate and explore poverty. Oh, can't hear you. Were you able to make the film you wanted to make? Did somebody, did anyone in China come in and say, no, you can't cover that or you can't go there or you can't say that? So, I mean, again, not at all. I mean, that was the kind of beauty of working there. I mean, we worked with Chinese crews and that, but I had a very good rapport with the Chinese crews. We spent a lot of time in the field. We had a lot of support. And I was never instructed, oh, you can film this and you can't film that. You can tell this story and you can't tell that story. When we got involved in the edit, the edit was, I did the edit in the US with my editor, Kathy Shields, who is a brilliant editor and been cutting features and whatnot for ages. She's worked with me for, oh, 20 years now. And she did a spectacular job in trying to piece together these on-the-ground narratives. Again, no one was looking over our shoulder. We didn't really have a script per se. Robert worked closely with us. Robert Lawrence-Cune, who was the writer and host of the series in scripting the transitions. But it wasn't as if we got to a point where, oh, we'd have to send our scripts off for approval and this would be checked off and that wouldn't be checked off. In fact, there was a scene that some of the people felt, might challenge certain national views in China. And we said, these are important scenes. This is what happened. And they said, okay, this is what happened. It was a scene in which villagers would been moved from the mountains down to a kind of created village. We're finding that transition to be very challenging and difficult. And they were not especially happy about it, but they were openly criticizing it while we were filming it. And they were trying to come to grips with the fact that maybe their generation, they were farmers, might not feel so good having to go from being rural people to having to be factory workers. But they also realized for their children's sake, there was some real benefit. There was education, there was healthcare. So again, it wasn't like, oh, everything is wonderful and rosy. They did feel a certain level of critique. But overall, I felt people were very genuine. I didn't feel we were being sold any kind of line. We could ask any questions we wanted. I worked very closely with my directors, Chinese directors who became very good friends and discussed everything backwards, forwards, inside out as we began to build these narratives. So the answer is no, nothing came to us as a demand for change or editorial position. So it's very interesting that you said that you made the same kind of film, but that the political culture had changed around China. And so I'm just curious, how long have you been working in China and how did you experience that? Because that's real. Yeah, no, that's a good question. I think we were a little surprised by what had happened on this film. I mean, again, we were very conscientious about the position we took. I mean, my interest as a filmmaker is to try and tell stories. I like to try and tell narratives. I'm not that keen. If I could have my druggers, all my films would be observational films. That's where you just spend time in the field. My background is in anthropology. I worked in the Andes in Peru, made many documentaries throughout the world. Many of them were observational or verite style documentaries. And I think in that way, you really come to understand the tender and texture of a given situation. So I was, again, surprised that it seemed that in this election year when the film came out, somehow China could do no good. Everything had to be a critique. Everything had to be negative. And there was no way you could say, well, look, our system is different. Either way, we might approach poverty or other countries might approach poverty is different. And it has to do with our histories and our own political ideologies. But that doesn't mean that it's the only way to do something. And the Chinese have a different history and a different political ideology and they have a different kind of solution. Now, to say, oh, we can't learn from the Chinese is ridiculous to me. It's as if we're saying, well, we'll close off the sort of wonderful diversity in the world because well, we only want one kind of crop to thrive. And so I think that was a real mistake. There's nothing wrong with trying to learn how people do things. We might not like it. We might think it won't work in our system, but it gives us an option. It gives us a broader picture about how the world works. And even more significant than that, being able to get inside China and tell the Chinese story really does combat. I felt a lot of stereotypes about what was going on in China. Now, that's not to say that everything China does is perfect and there's not human rights issues, et cetera. Yes, there are. Many countries have issues. I think China has issues as well. But that doesn't negate the fact that what they did and how they worked on poverty in China was a really significant thing. And that doesn't negate the desire ability to want to tell a story about something globally unique, historically unique, which it was China's war on poverty, which I think historically it's unprecedented. And I think certainly worth understanding if we're interested in the world at all. That was, yeah, exactly. It's historically so important. I mean, this has never happened in history and to be censored is just so bizarre. It just shows again, how frightened the Americans are. And I've been reading Eddie Glad's book, Begin Again. And really what you're naming is the same thing at the core. And it's kind of Biden's about to come out with this foreign policy, which is America first. And to be having everybody up in arms about white supremacy in the Congress, but not understanding what white supremacy looks like, which you just described around getting information about China. You just basically described, we don't listen. We know. So, but you made two different versions of this. Some of us have been able to watch it on the China network, on GTCN, China, global, television network. But you also have another version. What was the different, how did you decide in the editing to make two? Again, this is expediency sake. I mean, as we as filmmakers already know how we broadcast something sometimes just determines what we have to do. PBS needed a 58 minute version for their local channel. They needed a 56 minute version for their national. Obviously, maybe one could say directors have a tendency to be a little self-indulgent, but I couldn't imagine making anything less than say 80 minutes because of the texture of the film the detail is really key. And I think that we have the capacity to watch long documentaries if they're well structured and the storytelling is good, which I believe that poverty film certainly fulfilled. And so the director's cut, so to speak was a feature length version. Scenes play out a little bit more and we added a whole scene that wasn't in the shorter version. And the reason I made that decision was as we went through to think about the edit and we have to get it down to, I don't know if you've been in the edit room much, but yeah, I'm sure you have, but I don't know about our viewers have, but you sit down with your editor and you're trying to figure out what we got to cut this down and we realized we could snip a little here and we could tighten the scenes here, et cetera, et cetera. But at some point, especially in observational film the weight of the narrative begins to fall apart because what is special about an observational and narrative film is that it kind of unfolds in a seemingly naturalistic way. Of course, we're making decisions, we're taking months and months of work and distilling it into a 80 minute film. But so we determined not to crunch the scenes down too much, not to do too many shorthands, try and let the scenes play out a bit. So we took a whole portion out and the portion out was the last one which was these five layers. But that's why I like people to see the original feature because I think the five layers tells the five layers, that's the provincial municipal county township village, it's very structured. That to me is really integral to understanding how the Chinese system works. It's equally that kind of system that allowed their approach to the COVID response to be as exacting as it was. It is this kind of integration from the lowest level, literally, we're talking about people living in caves in the countryside where a young cadre from the city who's a college educated young man travels out, lives for years with the population of really poor indigenous often people and tries to help them understand what they need to do to lift themselves out of be it education, be it industry, be it moving in some cases to a region that could work better. And that kind of integration I think is what made the whole system function. And the fact was it wasn't isolated, it worked its way all the way through the system from the very top. And that's something I think we could learn a lot about is that that kind of integration, we have big ideas and we have middle ideas and we have people on the ground willing to work and we have things at a very grassroots level that equally function in a national resonance. Well, in watching your film, what I saw was that it really holds some of what I think of as democracy, which is engaged democracy. I don't think that the United States, we have democracy in any form since the billionaires own like the elections and the media, so of which if they're owned, you can't actually have a democracy. But even that we call voting democracy where what was fun about watching your film is just like everybody's voting at every level. And it's you're engaged from the bottom to the top, you're engaged with a real problem. And I like that you say it's like the information flows both ways. One is, here's the goal, but it's like, no, that's not gonna work for me or here's my, that guy's there for two years to try to figure out. It's not welfare, like we're gonna throw some money at you and we're not gonna give you a path out or your kids. It's, this is a real structure that's gonna hold you here and we wanna help you and your kids have more. It's not even, I think the beautiful thing too is it comes out of a care, which none of the way we address poverty in the US doesn't come out of caring concern. It comes out of judgment, hate and anger. It's just like, which demoralizes into values and really doesn't treat the other with dignity. I just, I like the dignity part of to the very bottom, there's a sense of dignity. Even if you don't get your way, there's, you've been related to, which we don't have at any of the layers. And just being able to see that, that you can solve problems being related to each other and having a plan that doesn't just keep it in the same structure that's failing. So that was beautiful. So we, I earlier, you said that soon we should be able to watch your full length version on Amazon, right? Right, well, let me just touch base, go back to something you were saying. I think this was interesting, the scene, the democratic process scene, I think is a really very interesting scene. And in that scene, the local villagers get together and they actually vote on who's been lifted out of poverty who's still in poverty, because people realize that sometimes their neighbors might be hiding a little bit of money or they might, and I think that was a really, and in a sense, who would know better about your neighbors and that the system allowed that kind of democratic process to unfold, I thought was really significant. And that was a kind of participatory process that the villagers were involved in. I wanna just underscore that, because I think that was maybe surprising to some people that there is that ability to vote to help participate in this process. The other thing I wanted to mention was again, you touched on it, but the cadres, the young men and women who were working on the front lines, really, I felt they were really genuine about it. I mean, I don't think it was a great career move for them always. I think that they really believed that this was something that was good to do. One of the young cadres that we featured, he had done his year, it's like, teach for America or whatever he did his year and he could go back to law school and I think that's what, can't recall exactly what his profession was, but he chose another year and he's living far away from his family. He would get on his cell phone and chat with his kids. He missed their birthdays, but he really wanted to fulfill his duty, which he felt was to live in these villages. He saw himself as being lucky and he really wanted to help. Another example was in the story we did on the camel. You'll see this in the film. It's talking about a film that many people haven't seen yet. So I hope to get a chance, harken back to what Jodi just said that you'll have a chance to see it so you can actually discuss the scenes and interact with them. But we did a scene in a very, very remote part of China, which was in the far Northwest, which is the Xinjiang province, which is where the Uyghurs are. And these were people who were camel herders and they had been semi-nomadic. They were more, they really weren't Han Chinese. They were a minority group. And a man who had kind of was running a factory to try and produce camel milk for marketing, he said genuinely, it's in the film, he said that he grew up during periods in Chinese history when people were really starving and he knew their pain and he realized intrinsically what it was all about. He would go to sleep hungry and he said that he couldn't not do what he was doing, which was, and he was a very genuine man, which was as the foreman of this factory to try and refocus and reconstitute this such that the herders could actually make a decent living out of selling and creating a market for their camel milk. And again, it grew out of a real sense of having experienced hunger, having experienced poverty and literally a compassion. And we saw this over and over again in the film where people were quite engaged with the process that they were being asked to and participating in. So that was very significant. Now, we will be posting the film either on Amazon or I now pass a link around to the website. When all of this began to blow up, we didn't finish the website. We had a lot of festivals planned for the film and then COVID came. And as we all know, all the festivals got canceled and even the online festivals didn't quite catch up yet. They're still on work exactly. And as a filmmaker, at least of the world's problems is as a filmmaker, I couldn't show my film. Okay, all right, I can live with that. There's other problems in the globe, I must say. But nonetheless, so we're hoping to be able to reinstigate a distribution so people can watch the film and get it into some conferences and some discussions. I think it is a real catalyst for discussing poverty. I think it's a catalyst for discussing China. I think it's a catalyst for discussing poverty in America and poverty really throughout the world. That's a problem that has not been solved and are we moving towards a solution? Well, that's a big question. The verdict is still out on that one. So I think that that's coming. We also began to shoot the new episode with my Chinese crew on the poverty alleviation. This is the year 2020 now when many of the intractedly poor have been lifted over a poverty line. That was one of the goals of Xi Jinping. And the crews we structured it and I was about to travel out to China. We were to get going on it and of course the travel ban came. So I couldn't travel to China, things locked down in China, things locked down in America. Little by little things began to open up more in China but I still couldn't travel. We tried to get the crews were out in the countryside doing some of the filming to explore, okay, what's happened now? There were some really good stories to take this to the next step. We haven't begun the post-production on it. It's still a little bit up in the air about what will happen, certainly internationally with that film, given a lot of the issues that we've been discussing so far. Well, that's really concerning because basically what you're saying is, here I was being able to tell all these stories about China then something happened close to the door. A really amazing, very educational film that should be winning awards gets censored and then you have other stories to tell that are also important to hear. And when a funder or a network or whoever gets to help make the film have an audience sees, oh, that's gonna happen, then it's also a chilling effect on you being able to tell more stories which that's heartbreaking. I think it's a function of many issues. Now, I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful. I mean, COVID is a reality, complicated political sectitudes are, these are issues we deal with them. As filmmakers, if we're not dealing with them, we're not doing our job. So I don't, I mean, sure, it's sometimes it's annoying is the wrong word, but it's exasperating. But I think that we need to, as filmmakers as storytellers, we need to be pushing the boundaries. I mean, it is our duty to chronicle the times. And again, maybe she's adherent to this idea of trying to let these narratives tell themselves. And I think, let's be thankful for all of us documentary filmmakers not to sort of pat ourselves in the back, but we're doing a very important job. I mean, we're willing and desires to go out into the field to spend time, to try and bring these stories back, to try and open up discussions, and I'm hopeful. I don't think it's the end. I think COVID is putting pressure on and politics come and go. That was our experience. I think things will change. People like what Code Pink is doing will equally help push the narrative along to the point at which we can begin to tell these stories again. So again, it's hopeful and it's not gonna stop me telling stories. That's for sure. And it's not gonna stop me from wanting to tell more stories from inside China. Wow, well, I'm so grateful for that. Just one last question. You've been going to China. And what are your just thoughts and feelings about being there, the people? You know, it's an experience. I don't know if you've spent time in China. It's an experience. I mean, this is one of the greatest social experiments on the planet. I mean, it is a very unique kind of thing that is unfolding. I've found traveling and working in China to be ever and always compelling and interesting. People are open in a way that would surprise you. The crews I worked with are very talented. The teams I work with, some CGTN, it's a very energetic, talented pool of people who wanna tell their own stories and working internationally, I think is quite good. This is an important issue. Sometimes within the structure of China, people learn how stories might or should be told. Internationally, we have slightly different kinds of perspectives. I felt that a big part of my job was to bring the kinds of perspectives and the kinds of approaches to documentary history, which is very different in the US. If we track ourselves back to Flaherty all the way through all the documentary movements here to bring these ideas to China, the Chinese filmmakers aren't necessarily schooled in the kind of sort of narrative that documentary is. And documentaries are really, it's a really vibrant kind of sort of art form. And so feeling that I was trying to explain what was necessary internationally to tell a story, how pacing, how mood, how these things worked, working with my Chinese colleagues who might have been not given the breath to be able to do that. I think they felt extremely gratified to be able to make a film like this, because that's not something that would necessarily have come out of the national, would not have necessarily come out of the national broadcasting studio, CGTN or CCTV. So there really wasn't in an exchange. They would help me understand the stories, understand what was going on in the ground. I would bring a kind of documentary narrative process to it. And as I said, I'm hoping to make more films in China. I'm optimistic and certainly believe in what we do. Well, you just described what we, China is not our enemy is all about, is together in sharing, everyone is enhanced. And you just perfectly described it. And the Chinese are happy to be, to learn, to share and to co-create. And we need to continue to raise up the narrative that China is not our enemy. And I thank you so much for coming on with us today. I thank you so much for making this amazing film and all you've done to share, to be a window into a world too many people have not had the experience of. So thanks, Peter. And could you tell us, well, maybe just everyone who signed the petition to PBS, we'll just make sure they get a link once they can buy your film. Yeah, I should get the link up and running and we'll have that ASAP. So I really appreciate it. Thank you everyone for coming and joining us. And Jody, thank you very much. I really enjoyed speaking with you and hopefully we'll have many more adventures together. Yes, thank you. I hope so. I love your hope. All right, thanks everyone for joining. Peace out. Bye now. Bye.