 I would like to thank everybody for coming tonight. And before we begin tonight's proceeding, I would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on the traditional country of the Nunawal peoples and pay respect to the elders past and present. I recognize and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs and relationship with the land. I also extend respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today. So we're about to begin the film screening, but before we do, I would like to introduce our special guest, Gu Tao. Gu Tao was born in 1970 in Inner Mongolia, China, where his father was an ethnographer and a photographer. He graduated in 1995 from Inner Mongolia Art College with a major in oil painting. After studying photography at the China Academy of Art in Beijing, he started making documentary films, many of which have won awards at international film festivals. The movie we will see today, The Last Moose, is the third of his Aluguya trilogy, and Aluguya refers to the place where the film is made, which includes Aluguya, Aluguya, Hugo and his mother, and then this film today. So after we are done with the movie, we will have a panel discussion and a Q&A with the director. So thank you so much for coming, and I hope you enjoy the movie. His research focuses on issues of environmental pollution and grassroots actions in Mongolia, China and Japan. Next to him is Professor Lee Narangawa, who specializes in modern Japanese and Mongolian history, culture and politics. Before she joined the ANU staff, she was a researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen. She teaches courses in Japanese history and language, Mongolian history, and other courses including lies, conspiracy and propaganda. Dr. Christian Surace is a post-doctoral fellow at the CIW, and his research focuses on ideology, discourse and political concepts of the Chinese Communist Party and how they shape policies, strategies and governance habits. And of course, Gu Tao, who is the director of the film. What we're going to do is, the three panelists will respond to the film first with short statements, then Gu Tao will speak, and I expect that soon after that we'll open up to questions from the audience. So why don't we begin with, would you like to begin? Good evening, everyone. So I'm an ethnic Mongolian from Inner Mongolia, so it's my great pleasure to be here and share my feelings with all of you and the director Gu Tao. It was two years ago, one of my high school classmates recommended this documentary to me. He's an ethnic Daur. Daur people also live very close to Ewingki people in the northern part of Inner Mongolia. He said that you should watch this documentary as a social scientist. He told me that he had lots of stuff to say about this documentary but just don't know where to start because he had a kind of mixed emotions. And then I found this documentary on YouTube. Eventually I got the same feelings too, a kind of mixed emotions. So the Ouija is very familiar to me. I even imagined that I met him somewhere in my Mongolian community. In other words, I understand his feelings and have a great sympathy of his life. There is a sense of loss in our hearts in terms of language, culture, living environment, life and dignity. Because of that, I would say Ouija is the kind of model of our generation. He's not only belonging to Ewingki people but also belonging to ethnic Mongolian people too. I think one of my friends from Daur people had the same feelings. Of course, on the other hand, many ethnic Ewingki people and of course Mongolian people have made a different choice. As Ouija said, just drink yourself to death. The rest has to adopt a new environment. So there is a choice to be the rest. In a sense, I'm the one who should be considered as the rest. We don't drink too much. We're trying to keep our sober mind and we're feeling kind of compliance for our ability to adapt. That is why we have mixed emotions toward Ouija. Ouija's words are so sharp and he makes us not very comfortable. His words pierced our wound where it had not yet healed. Finally, I'd like to express my admiration for Gutao's independent view of history. Forward and progress has an unshakable position in Chinese political atmosphere. In a perspective of progressivism, Ouija is a kind of backward person and his fate is eliminated by history. However, Gutao has issued a different point of view which creates an opportunity for us to stop and rethink. Thank you Gutao and thank you everyone. Good evening everyone. My name is Inarangawa and I watched this film only by documentation by Christian. When I watched it, it made me think a lot of things. Many of my reflections are very similar to what Ouija has already mentioned. I'm also an ethnic Mongolian from China and there are a lot of similarities. When I saw this film, my first impression was that this is not an own story. It is a story he represents many, many minorities in China and many, many minority intellectuals. How they feel about their own culture, their situation, and about their ethnic future. It is a very sad story but the interesting thing is not only the Ewenk and many, many other minorities they have this kind of incredible sadness about their own future and at the same time they are incredibly proud about their own past. They believe that modernity and progress is not something that we can measure with high-rises, with technology. Every single civilization has got their own progressiveness and value. The other thing I was thinking about or reflecting about this film was that the kind of questions many of you may also ask is that is there any way we can preserve, we can coexist without actually being assimilated, without losing kind of own language and culture. Compared to Ong, Mongols are sort of the bigger minorities and they still have their own language and their own script and so many, many intellectuals compared to the Ongs. But I think it is not the number which makes difference. I think what makes difference is whether we recognize each other, whether it is very small number of people or very small language, whether it has got script or not, whether how we could preserve it. So there are many, many other sources I had but I am very happy to discuss with you. So first I would like to thank Guta so much for making the long trip to Australia and for making these wonderful films. So this is one film that belongs to a series and I definitely recommend the other ones. And all of which have given me many intense emotions and opportunities for reflection. I would also like to thank the ANU Centre on China in the World and our director, Dr. Benjamin Penney, for hosting the event and especially I would like to thank Nancy Cho for all of her hard work and ingenuity in dealing with the logistics. I would also like to thank the Mongolia Institute and Dr. Lee Narangoa for their sponsorship. And there are so many people I would like to thank who helped me in different ways but then we would be here for a while, which actually leads me to my point. It's funny when planning an event you realize how dependent we are on infrastructures of support and on other people. And a part of what I want to talk about tonight is what happens when those infrastructures collapse and are taken away. I think one of the reasons why Guta's movies are so haunting is that their message travels and resonates beyond their local circumstances. We can even learn about the Ivankis' contemporary predicament by looking across the ocean at the history of genocide and sedentarization of Native American nations in the United States. And it is even more interesting if we track the history of animals. The disappearance of the moose from the forests of Hulu and Be'ar and the eradication of the bison from the Dakota Plains were central to the processes of cultural extinction in both places. In her book Dispatches from Dystopia, the historian Kate Brown argues, quote, the story of General Custer and his defeat by Crazy Horse at the Battle of Little Bighorn is well known. So too are his infamous trips through the plains, shooting bison and leaving the stench of rotting flesh. Custer was one of a number of Americans who felt that the extermination of the buffalo would inspire the Indians to settle down, end quote. For pastoral nations like the Sioux, the Cheyenne and the Crow, the end of the buffalo meant the end of their way of life. In the haunting words of Plentyku, the leader of the Crow Nation at the end of the 19th century, quote, when the buffalo went away and the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened, end quote. So more than a century later and on a different continent, we hear Wei Jia say, quote, the guns were gone after we moved. We had nothing to do, so we started drinking. Drinking heavily, people started dying. Already eight of us have died. We're lost, our culture, our guns are gone, so we drink, end quote. In his book, Radical Hope, the philosopher Jonathan Lear interprets Plentyku's statement to mean that life for the Crow went on after the buffalo died, but there was no longer a world in which actions could be ascribed familiar meanings. As Lear explains the same action that meant one thing in the past, a display of martial valor and courage, meant an entirely different thing on the reservation. It was now illegal and a barbaric practice. The only bridge between these two worlds is one of memory and loss. Similarly for the Ivenki people, life continues in the settlements and Wei Jia's life continued when he moved to Hainan, but it is life without a world. So why is the fate of nomadic reindeer people in the remote regions of Inner Mongolia so haunting? When we watch Wei Jia's self-destruction on the screen, we see people that we know including our own future possibilities. I've heard before that Gu Tao rejects the label of being an anthropological filmmaker. I suspect in part because Wei Jia's situation of living amidst cultural collapse belongs to the human condition. No one expects that their world will disappear. The possibility that the world can collapse is probably the kind of knowledge that Nietzsche suggested we must forget in order to remain alive. Wei Jia's, when he is living in China's southern island of Hainan, he remarks, I'm not interested in the sights here, the big hotels, that has nothing to do with me. I'm just interested in the local villages, their customs and way of life. Perhaps his motivation to research other villages was driven by a shared sensibility of camaraderie through the experience of loss and precarity. Perhaps he wanted to find other possibilities for coping with extinction. Thank you. Now we'll ask Gu Tao to speak, perhaps responding or saying other things about the film. Thank you to the university and Christian for allowing me to bring a very cold film to such a warm country. Thank you so much to the ANU and to Christian for allowing me to bring such a cold film to such a warm place. Of course, this warmth includes a country's system. And the warmth is not just of the weather, but it is of the system, the system that we have here in Australia. I don't know what to say about the film, but ten years ago, I was able to film a series of films, but the reality I saw was different from what I saw on TV. Ten years ago, when I began to make this film, I saw that the reality before my eyes was different from the reality that I saw on the TV. But every time I watch it with you, I feel that I haven't made a good film. Whenever I see this film with a group of people, I always feel like I haven't directed it well enough. I haven't made it well enough. Because I didn't expect to put it on the TV or put it on the school's standard space. Because when I was making it, it never occurred to me that I would be showing it at film festivals or universities in such a very regular theater like this. It hadn't occurred to me. When I was making it, I felt that technology itself was not important. Even the equipment used was not important. It actually showed me the direct observation of the film in the film production process. But for me, the important thing is not the technology, it's not that stuff. What it is, is to actually honestly reflect my observations of the Erwanker people. Can I ask a question? I don't know. It's very, very interesting. So you spent 10 years living with the Erwanker people. How did they react to your presence when you were with them? I mean, they seemed very natural with it at this point. But how did you gain the confidence of the people who you were filming? I said, you have been filming for 16 days. When you first started, how did you make them feel at ease and trust you so much to make you film their lives? Because my father, in the 70s, in the 80s, recorded the Erwanker people, the Erlenchun people, and the Taobao people in the 70s, and the 80s. My father had been documenting the lives of the Erwanker people and several other minorities from that region in photographs at the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s. When I was young, when I was 10, 11, 12, I would see my father who did the Erwanker people and the Erwanker people in the 70s, and the Erwanker people in the 80s. He was the Erwanker, the Erwanker, the Erwanker, the Erwanker, the Erwanker, who didn't... He would just go into their lives and observe them and photograph them like this. And when I was a young boy, I would see him developing these photographs, and I thought, this is so beautiful, this is such a beautiful place and people that he's documenting. And so I wanted to see 30 years later what had happened, what it was like. In these 30 years, China has made a huge change in the 30th century since the reform and opening of the 80s. But at the same time, there is a kind of the most important thing that cannot be protected from the development of more important things. That is the spirit and the most traditional way of life. Those 30 years, by coincidence, were also the 30 years when the reforms, the first 30 years of the economic reforms during which China experienced a lot of economic growth and progress. But what I saw there was what heavier than the progress was the loss of culture, the fact that this culture that was so unprotected, a loss of traditional spirit and tradition in general. I come from an arts background. I studied art at university and so when I went to start filming what I actually ended up filming was not what I thought I would be filming. A lot of things that I encountered along the way influenced the way that the film came out in the end. I'm wondering whether anyone, yes? I have a question about their language. This speaks Chinese in such a fluent way. I think most of the Mongolian herders living in a rural area can't speak Chinese like Weijia and Weijia can even make a poem in Chinese. I think, in a sense, Weijia Chinese may be much better than mine even though I'm living in a city in Huqat. Are they only speak Chinese in daily life? I thought they also speak Mongolian language. So that's because of you filming them. They always speak Chinese or hardly speak Mongolian with their Mongolian community members. They don't speak Chinese. They don't need anything to prepare for you. People often ask me whether or not you ask them to speak Chinese. I can understand that. But it's not true. They are already completely speaking Chinese. But their elders can speak Chinese but they refuse. Actually Weijia and his clan have been speaking Chinese since the 70s or 80s. A lot of people ask me this question. But in fact, these Weijia and his clan and the people that you see, they do speak Chinese among each other. It's the older people who can speak fluent and they often can speak and understand Chinese but they refuse to. So how did you choose Weijia? Because he is an incredible character. He is really intelligent. What is his education level? How did you choose Weijia? How did you choose Weijia? In fact, I took a lot of pictures because there are fewer people on the screen. That is to protect others. Since 2004, I have been preparing for a year to work with them. I have been sleeping and drinking. Since 2005, I started taking pictures for a long time. In the past 8 years, I have taken a few people and I have been living in Weijia for a long time. They are more free. They are also painting. I am also painting. It's more convenient. It's because of this film that I chose this one. Before, there were two films of Weijia. It's not a lot. It's just that this film has been made for a year. Actually, when I went there in 2004, I began filming lots of different families. I worked with them. I drank with them. I slept in the community. I was there for a long time. I did live in Weijia in his family's tent. They were a bit looser, a bit freer. He painted, I painted. It made sense. There are two other films in this particular series and Weijia doesn't make that much of an appearance in the other two. After I cut this film, I also found that Weijia's expression was very good. She didn't make too many films. In order to make a film, she used a lot of materials to make films. Her changes were the most abundant. She left life and went to the sea. She had love. She went back to life. Her changes were great. After she cut the film, it was her biggest change. Also, when I was editing the footage, that's when I discovered Weijia as someone to become the centre of the film. It hadn't occurred to me really before when I was just filming him and everybody else. The changes in his life were the most dramatic. The biggest changes occurred to him. He went to Hainan, the love story, the end of the love story is returned to the forest and so on. It was through the process of looking at all the footage and editing that I made this particular film about Weijia. I think we have about 15 minutes for questions and we have microphones. If you raise your hand, I'll send the microphone around to you. Should I ask in English? Ask in English and then Chinese if you can do both. That's great. I want to appreciate Gu Tao Dayan first because I think this is really an amazing movie and I really enjoyed it a lot. I cried twice. The first time Weijia mentioned that the Uwen Ku people just follow the the schedule of nature. When the animals are mating, you can't just hunt or just kill them. I think it's very important because nowadays people just don't really obey anymore because they want to make more money. The second time is at last because he seemed like he got no way to do because he lost his culture and he couldn't do what he used to do anymore and the whole... Do you have a question? Sorry. Everybody has a chance. No statements. My question is because I think this movie got some parts which is against... Maybe it's not allowed to play in China so I just want to ask how it is like in China because I also noticed it's kind of different what we read from the news like where the minority life are like and how is Weijia's life now? Could you ask that in Chinese? Or do you want me to? Hello I really like this movie and I just want to ask what's the situation of Weijia now? And also the children of the Uwen Ku people they still talk about how they are and whether it's the result of the big city or they are still like this. And what's the situation in China? Because I noticed the situation of the minority life is very different from the news. Thank you. After Weijia came back from Hainan she started drinking again. Of course, she was painting and writing. This August she was drunk again and she thought life is meaningless and meaningless. She took a knife and went to the forest because in this movie she said many people committed suicide like Japanese people. This August she committed suicide in this way and she didn't die. She stayed in the hospital for a few months for three months. She just recovered. After Weijia returned he began drinking again and he was drinking and writing his poetry and painting but he was drinking a lot and in August he got very very drunk and he decided that life was meaningless. The people who he referred to before had all taken their own lives and the way that they had taken their lives was like a Japanese using a knife to disembowel yourself. He took a knife and he went into the hospital and he tried to commit suicide. This is last August but he survived and he was in hospital for several months and now he's back home. He was very calm and brave and he waited for the sun to set and he said the sun was set and he didn't die. He was drunk and he didn't die. He felt very cold and he went back to the camp and was sent to the hospital. He very calmly cut himself and waited for the sun set and figured that he would be dead but he didn't die. He got very very cold and he somehow made his way back to the settlement and they got him to a hospital. Now he's recovered because the doctor said if he wasn't in the forest he would die. He's now kind of recovered. The doctor said he really has to live in the forest otherwise there's nothing for him. Other young people are studying in the city and their parents also hope that they stay in the city. In the past there was a school called Long Ke Yu where children were 5 years old but 10 years ago there wasn't a school like this like the Han group to study and to study Chinese. It's just a sign of life. Other young people study in Chinese schools if they're in the settlement the parents prefer them to stay in the settlements to study there for their future. 10 years ago they closed down the last schools where people learned in Iwenki and now for the young people their status as an Iwenki or other minorities basically just a matter of there what's written on their ID card. This letter because in China we are called independent film independent director so with the official the quality of the recording is different we will shoot it so we won't broadcast it in public or in the TV there's not much of a difference I'm an independent documentary maker and so I'm outside the official system there's no you know I don't submit my things and have them past I don't get public showings in cinemas or on the television that's how it works so thanks thank you very much I'm glad to go to for bringing such an impressive film here so my question is during you're making this film and also after that is there any government or non-governmental organization they're taking measures to preserve like the heritage like the cultural heritage or other features of those minor ethnic groups in China so thank you for bringing such a great film and we can see my question is during you're making this film and also after are there any government organizations or other non-governmental organizations to do some things to help these ethnic groups to preserve their cultural heritage or other heritage thank you I'm really not sure because during this 8 years actually many people are going to go to film and write articles but there's no specific NTO NTO to do specific things no it's it seems yes it should be but there are many scholars in China about national issues and some human scholars they will have a meeting to study some issues but there's no solution no over the 8 years that I was there you'd see lots of people coming to the hunting areas very curious they were looking at the Iwenki is exotic but no NGOs came to help do anything like that there's lots of scholars in China ethnographers and anthropologists and so on they discuss this and they try to figure out how to preserve these cultures but nobody's come up with a solution so that's where it stands I want to ask you about alcohol drinking in this film maybe some people think people are backward but they're not they're not they're not they're not they're not they're not they're not they're not they're not because Deutsch says people are backward they drink too much but actually you mentioned but actually you mentioned you also drank with them and drinking was part of their culture so could you provide us a more rounded view point about their drinking culture Thank you The But drinking alcohol is completely different from what we are doing now. In the past, we were divided into a group of people. We were divided into a group of people for a long time. At that time, there might be a few other people who would drink alcohol. But now, since 2003, after the birth of Dr. Yiming, after the death of Dr. Yiming, the life in the past is completely different. Life has no meaning. Life has entered a life of hopelessness. So it is convenient to drink alcohol. This change is quite obvious. There was drinking before, but it was very different. The spirit in which alcohol was consumed was very different. What would happen would be, for example, in the hunting, they would kill an animal and everybody would enjoy it together and have a drink as part of that sharing. It was a way of enjoying things together. But after 2003, with the settlements, the taking away of the guns and so on, there was a loss of meaning and a loss of hope in people's lives, and that led to the kind of drinking to get drunk, this sort of nihilistic drinking that we see in the film. We just mentioned that approaches who make the moods disappear. Who are those approaches he indicated? Are they Han people? In the film, there was a hunter who made the moods disappear. He said, who is the hunter? Are they Han people? Because they are hunters themselves. Who is the hunter? This is the police and some people from the northern part of Hong Kong. Because in the northern part of Hong Kong, there are people from the countryside. In fact, life is not suitable for them. They can only go up the mountain to use the resources of the forest to make the moods. That's what the hunter said. They are all Han people. Is it for eating meat or... They are for selling. What are they selling? For selling the prey. Is it for selling the skin or meat? Police and some of the migrant workers in the north, they are Chinese. They work by setting traps. They don't do very well. They are poor. I asked, why do they poach? The reason is to sell the reindeer, to sell the horns, the meat, the skin, the whole thing. Those are the poachers. Thank you, Director Gu, for bringing us such a great work. I think the traditional and modern development is a balanced topic. I have a few questions. The first one is, did you learn Chinese at home? I will ask two short questions. Ask one, because we have two people. I will ask one question. I know that you shot this film for a long time, for eight years. At the very beginning, do you know how long will you shoot? Because the stories will always be continued. How do you know when the story will end and you start making this film and present to the audience? At the beginning, when you were shooting the film, you didn't know how long it would take. At the beginning of the eight years, the story will always be continued. How do you decide that the story will end and you will present it to the audience? You saw the ending of this film. But I didn't release the last shot today. It should be three seconds. Weijia returned from Hainan to Senglin. She was carrying a wooden head. She threw it on the ground at the end. But it was stuck. When I was editing the film, I thought it should have ended. I could release anything, no matter what kind of living conditions I was in. Otherwise, a film would have changed my life. For me, a writer, the less the minority, the less the minority, I was a group. That's the end of the film. With this particular film, there was a thing which we didn't see because the DVD got stuck. It was just a three-second thing. It was when he's carrying that log through the forest. What he does is he throws it down. It seems to me that you can throw things down. Life has so many changes. That's where in the editing process I decided the film could stop. We've got two questions there. Then we might have to conclude. Thank you. I think that if we let culture and language develop in their natural state, they will change in each other's lives. They will learn from each other and become more and more similar. They will disappear. On the one hand, we want to strengthen and preserve the nature of culture. On the other hand, we often encourage young people to interact with each other and learn from each other. I don't know how you see this contradiction. I'll translate it myself. Yes, just briefly. I'm asking a question about the contradiction I felt between the culture preservation and cultural change because I feel that the loss of the language and culture is due to the pressure from the policy or some political reasons. But I feel that if we let the culture and language go naturally, they will also change and learn from each other. Sometimes they will become more similar due to cultural communication. I feel that on the one hand, we want to keep a culture the way it used to be. On the other hand, we encourage people to make cultural communication and learn from each other. I wonder what you think of this contradiction. Thank you very much. We make films like this in China. China is also a small and independent film. Like you said, there are a lot of films like this in China. I don't know if you have noticed or if you haven't noticed because watching this film reminds me of this thing. I don't know if you have noticed or if you haven't noticed about this thing. Everyone has their own expression. For example, I dyed this place as my observation. I don't want others to see the other people's point of view. In reality, How do they integrate into civil society and modern society after the establishment of a democracy? But that may not be what I have observed. I am not a human or democratic scholar. I am an independent filmmaker. This is the story I tell but there are lots of films that do tell a story along the lines you were describing. Everybody has their own way of experiencing a thing and these are my observations. There are lots of films and TV shows that show that kind of assimilation and that kind of, I suppose, the happier story. I am not an anthropologist. I am not an ethnographer. I am just using my personal reaction to what I saw in this one little slice of history. It is one part. It is not a whole. It is just a piece of the story. Thank you very much for your film. I really enjoyed it. I just want to know whether it has had an impact on you yourself. You, like the main character, was more interested in still seeing the village rather than the big city. Has that sort of impact on you? I didn't quite catch it. Did you? I just had an impact on the story. Oh, the story? Okay. Okay. It is a kind of comparison and a kind of new observation. In the north of Xinjiang, the Khazakh tribe, and in the south of Xinjiang, the Mongolian tribe, they found that the people were in a state of survival and mental state. In addition to this, I've gone to the northwest to Xinjiang and looked at, for a new perspective, to compare how different minorities in China have coped, I suppose. I've looked at the Khazakhs, the Mongolians who live in the southern part of Xinjiang, and what I've seen is that there's a lot of similarities in all of these stories. Tonight I would also like to thank Linda and Jayden for doing such a fantastic job of translating these schedules to come see this film and to thank Gu Tao for being here and for doing this. So Gu Tao didn't go with his camera to record this. It would be an even greater tragedy because it would just disappear without a trace. So anyway, thank you all. Please check out our website. We have other films coming up in March and other events at the Mongolian Institute as well. Again, I appreciate the support and have a wonderful evening.