Surreal Short
I’m having Asia flashbacks as DP Brent Huffman talks about the big white elephant mall in Guangzhou, the largest mall in the world and an unaccepted failure of surreal proportions. For face-saving reasons, the Chinese government cannot abandon the unfinished (and nearly unoccupied) mall/amusement park with its construction hazards, enormous indoor rollercoaster (dubiously welded), oversized Teletubbies, and population of semi-employed workers and moms looking for something (unsafe) to do with bored toddlers. Which apparently includes launching them onto a river inside human-sized balloons filled with about two minutes of oxygen, to cavort to the point of mild asphyxia before they’re towed back in
How could this not be the subject for a documentary short? Utopia, Part 3: The World’s Largest Shopping Mall premiered last night in the Documentary Shorts program; as the title suggests, it is one segment of Sam Green and Carrie Lozano’s envisioned series on global expressions of utopia.
Huffman shot on a Sony 900R (at 24p) rented from a Shanghai rental company. For cheap. “The joke is that it would be cheaper to rent cameras an in Shanghai and fly them back to the States then to rent them here,” says Huffman who is married to Chinese filmmaker Xiaoli Zhou and is working with her next on a documentary about Chinese colonization in Africa.
Huffman says the two-week shoot escaped government scrutiny, in part because the filmmakers pitched it as a “positive” look at the achievements of the mall. They also knew not to apply for a journalist/media visa (a red flag that rates a government escort) but rather traveled on a tourist visa and stayed low profile with a small lighting package—mostly LED.
Green, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his 2004 feature length documentary on the Weather Underground, cut on Final Cut Pro.
See the film Monday 11:30a at Holiday Village; Wednesday 6pm at the Egyptian; Saturday 12:45p in Salt Lake at the Broadway Center and at 11:30p at Holiday Village.
See Huffman’s demo reel and profile on Reel-Exchange here.
