HAOQUAN
WANG
A Day with
Black Chinese
Course "Make Believe" Project:
A parafiction documentary which
talks about culture invasion in China
Project Name: A Day with Black Chinese
Project Type: Individual Project
Time Duration: 2 Weeks
My Role: Director, Script writing, Filming, Editing, Caption
Actors: Bongani Musikavanhu, Ruixiang Han and some strangers
Abstract
Black Chinese is a biography film, shot with the techniques of a documentary. By applying the methodology of Parafiction, and based on Ugandan General Yoweri Kaguta Museveni who studied Mao Zedong’s knowledge and won the Uganda Bush War from 1981 to 1986, and served as the Prime Minister of Uganda for 34 years, the film is designed to portray a fictional black character “Dilon” from Uganda who is deeply influenced by Chinese culture because of the real history and came to China for study. The film mainly records Dillon’s Chinese life in China, why he came, how he lives and his friendships with Chinese and non-Chinese, and also his attitudes towards his own identity perception.
The Message
The project is about the culture invasion situation, in which some Chinese people try to be like black people because of the influence of Hip-hop music, culture, lifestyle, and fashion, etc, and the fact behind the phenomenon that the culture export of China is not as the way of China’s economic and global status growth. Even though China did a lot in terms of spreading its culture, it is obvious that China is weak in this area. A cultural-patriotic but also paradoxical social atmosphere exists on the Chinese Internet: some Chinese are manipulated by other cultures while some Chinese are sink in the illusion that China has a great impact on the world.
The message I want to convey through this project is that:
I want to reveal the contradictions psychological states of Chinese that we assume that we should not only just have an impact on the economy but also have a culture-wised influence around the world but the situation is not what we expected. The disconnection between the real and the imagination may cause extremely serious identity perception issues around society because the psychological states may cause two extremes: people’s cultural consciousness and identity perception is under the risk of being affected by other’ country’s cultural policy(culture invasion) and the other people may be trapped by the strong eager for spreading culture so that the eager evolved into a kind of patriotic or racist culture attitudes.
Images & Audio
In order to "make people believe" that China has a great culture influence in Africa, I fake a audio track for African version background music of eyes exercises
(Eye exercises is common for every Chinese elementary education student)
