A Drink With Echo Xie and Zhang Fan, Core Staff of DC Chinese Film Festival

Q&A With Echo Xie and Zhang Fan, Core Staff of DC Chinese Film Festival

Tracy Wang, Senior Editor | Nov 27, 2016 9:00 am | Add a comment | 1210 reads

Founded by Cai Yibin in 2011, the biennial DC Chinese Film Festival (DCCFF) celebrates Chinese cinema in its broadest sense, whether made by ethnically Chinese filmmakers, filmed in Mandarin or a regional language, or telling a story about the nation, it’s all about culture or diaspora. The third DC Chinese Film Festival took place in Washington DC at the end of September, and we spoke to two of their core staff – Echo Xie, the festival’s deputy director, and Zhang Fan, director of media and PR – via email to see how the event was received.

Could you introduce DCCFF?

Zhang Fan: By our definition, DC Chinese Film Festival is a nonprofit organization dedicated to discovering outstanding Chinese cinema around the world, and to encouraging cultural diversity through films. In my mind, DCCFF is a platform that provides young directors with professional connections and financial opportunities for projects, gets their films to be seen by a broader group of audiences, and celebrates the preciousness of film as art.

Echo Xie: At the moment DCCFF is completely run by volunteers. Our staff volunteers all have other day jobs but we devote most of our spare time and come together every year to make DCCFF happen. Our biennial festival showcases the best works from the past two years and has a main competition program that accepts submissions from all over the world. In between, we do other special programs such as retrospective series, master series, panels and other film-related events to continuously bring in great films and keep the conversation going.

What makes a movie a winner?

Fan and Xie: This year we gave out 13 awards, among which eight winners were selected by our jury, two were selected by the audience, and three programming awards (including DCCFF Story That Matters Award, DCCFF Emerging Talent Award and Inter-Culture Spotlight Award) were selected by the festival committee. Our jury consists of seven jurors: four foreign jurors and three Chinese jurors. They watched and scored all of the nominated films prior to the festival, and sit together for a two-hour meeting to discuss the winners.

As for the committee’s awards, we want to encourage more films to capture cultural and social perspectives. For example, this year we selected “Outsourced Work,” which documented the real and poor living conditions of those workers, as the “DCCFF Story That Matters Award.” Although the film was shot on SD camera and didn’t use many fancy techniques, we believe this film’s subject matter is far more meaningful.

But as one of our jurors, Golden Bear awardwinning director Professor Xie Fei said, “Good is always a relative term; the most important thing is that all these films get opportunities to be seen by more people, across the ocean, on big screen.”

What are the biggest obstacles that the festival faces and what makes it special?

Fan and Xie: As a young and nonprofit festival, there are some inherent challenges we have to face. It’s always hard to find funding, even harder to find sponsors who are not only willing to contribute but also share the same vision with us.

But we are really lucky none of these difficulties are big enough an “obstacle.” We always say DCCFF is like a magnetic field, it attracts the right people. The volunteers who have worked for the event were fantastic.

What do you think of the future of Chinese cinema?

Fan and Xie: The quality of the film content is getting more and more important. As we can tell from this year’s Chinese film box office, people are tired of Hollywood franchise films and domestic soap operas, and are inevitably looking for different content. I always believe Chinese directors and writers, even actors, need to learn to tell good stories. When all the stories in the cinema are the same or can’t deliver a core message to audiences, those films will not touch people’s hearts and will fail for sure.

This article first appeared in our November/December magazine. To read the entire issue online, please click here.