Filmmaker Zhu Rikun is homeless.
Not literally, but in a philosophical way.
“I still continue my job as a filmmaker,” he says. “I just feel homeless. I don’t feel any home anywhere, in China or the United States.”
Good for NYC, bad for Beijing: Beijing Indy film festival opening this month in NYC. @AngShah reports, with @RikunZhu http://t.co/BppCyEd0MB
— Ian Johnson (@iandenisjohnson) August 7, 2015
Zhu was the artistic director of the Beijing Independent Film Festival from 2006 to 2011 and is an acclaimed producer and director of independent film in China. In the years before he left Beijing, he was monitored, placed under house arrest and detained by authorities. The festival was shut down last summer. Zhu moved to the Hudson Valley, New York in the fall under a visa program for artists of extraordinary ability.
In a sense, both Zhu and the Beijing Independent Film Festival have become homeless, squeezed out of China’s increasingly tight space for artists and activists.
Next month, his film “The Dossier” will be screened in New York City as part of a special series of independent films from China. A sort of stand-in for what was blocked Beijing, Cinema on the Edge is an almost month-long event of 27 films curated from the Beijing festival that never took place.