Director Yi Chen first made waves with her documentary “First Vote,” which centered on the Chinese American community organizing for the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections. But Yi’s next documentary, “Dissidents,” focused on a different political issue: Chinese dissidents. The 75-minute film follows three protagonists: Juntao Wang, a primary organizer of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests; Weiming Chen, an artist whose work criticizes the Chinese government and is routinely burnt down and destroyed and lastly, Chunyang Wang, an asylum seeker who, after being forced out of her home, now protests outside the U.S Chinese Embassy.
Yi sat down with Character Media to discuss her work process, the unforeseen dangers of documentary filming and more.
Character Media: What specific elements in the documentaries you watched inspired you to become a filmmaker? Or did your passion for this art form develop gradually over time?
Yi Chen: I loved watching movies growing up and was inspired by auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard, Yasujiro Ozu, Alfred Hitchcock and so many more. When I went to [the] film program for graduate school, I initially wasn’t interested in documentaries; but, it was in a documentary history class that I watched Frederick Wiseman’s “High School” and Robert Drew’s “Primary” for the first time. I became fascinated by direct cinema and decided to make a cinéma vérité documentary for my thesis project.
CM: How did you come about covering the Chinese dissidents within the United States? In “First Vote,” you covered U.S. politics, so was it something you learned about through the first documentary, or was it a topic you knew you wanted to cover for some time?
YC:…
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