Timber Gang
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Country/Region:
China
Release Year: 2006
Release Year: 2006
Story:
Forests have been exploited for a living for over a century here. Due to the huge transportation inconveniences, people here still hold onto their inherited mode of production. Winter is the best logging season. Timber Gang documents the life of a group of loggers in Heilongjiang Province, China. It records the most basic state of being and desire of humans amidst ice and snow, and serves as a document of a disappearing mode of production as well as living in the process of civilization’s progress.
Forests have been exploited for a living for over a century here. Due to the huge transportation inconveniences, people here still hold onto their inherited mode of production. Winter is the best logging season. Timber Gang documents the life of a group of loggers in Heilongjiang Province, China. It records the most basic state of being and desire of humans amidst ice and snow, and serves as a document of a disappearing mode of production as well as living in the process of civilization’s progress.
Casts & Crews:
Yu Guangyi
Directors
Runtime:
90
minutes
Language:
Subtitles:
English
Festivals & Awards:
2007 Tokyo FILMeX , Japan 2007 Vancouver International Film Festival , Canada 2009 Hong Kong International Film Festival , Hong Kong 2009 Locarno International Film Festival , Switzerland 2017 Beijing Ethnographic Film Festival , China 2007 Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival , Director's Award and Critic's Award, Korea
2007 Tokyo FILMeX , Japan 2007 Vancouver International Film Festival , Canada 2009 Hong Kong International Film Festival , Hong Kong 2009 Locarno International Film Festival , Switzerland 2017 Beijing Ethnographic Film Festival , China 2007 Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival , Director's Award and Critic's Award, Korea
Tags:
Northeast China, Forests, Logging
Director‘s Statement:
I grew up in the forests of Heilongjiang. Many people in Timber Gang were my childhood buddies. After school we often went to play in the big shack where loggers were living. They had two big heatable brick beds; many old bachelors were living there. Many of them had come from Hebei Province or Shangdong Province to find their fortune in the former Manchuria. They would sit on their bare bottoms on the brick beds, with a comforter over their bodies and start telling those wonderful magical tales in the mountains in the former Manchuria period. Those tales have become the most important part of my cultural life and extracurricular education.
I have been away from my hometown for about twenty years. In winter 2004, I went back and walked among the loggers again, eating and living with them for a whole winter. Everything about them deeply touched me; I found myself all tears during filming. It is as if I had entered a tunnel where time was reversed. What those old loggers had related years ago came back alive for real, scene after scene. In the 21st century, people still strive so hard in order to make a living. Is this really my hometown? I approached them and made it an obligation of mine to document their life with honesty.
I was fortunate to spend a cold, long winter with these loggers and became witness and documentarians of a part of their real life. When I finished filming, it was already early summer of 2005. Editing took another year to finish in the busy, noisy city. Everyday while I was going through the huge amount of raw footage, my sentiments were split between the life of the loggers and that of the fashionable city folks out in the streets. I felt divided between the traditional regional culture and modern industrial civilization, between the forests that are being cut down and the sandstorms hanging outside my window…
This might be just the age we are living in.
I have been away from my hometown for about twenty years. In winter 2004, I went back and walked among the loggers again, eating and living with them for a whole winter. Everything about them deeply touched me; I found myself all tears during filming. It is as if I had entered a tunnel where time was reversed. What those old loggers had related years ago came back alive for real, scene after scene. In the 21st century, people still strive so hard in order to make a living. Is this really my hometown? I approached them and made it an obligation of mine to document their life with honesty.
I was fortunate to spend a cold, long winter with these loggers and became witness and documentarians of a part of their real life. When I finished filming, it was already early summer of 2005. Editing took another year to finish in the busy, noisy city. Everyday while I was going through the huge amount of raw footage, my sentiments were split between the life of the loggers and that of the fashionable city folks out in the streets. I felt divided between the traditional regional culture and modern industrial civilization, between the forests that are being cut down and the sandstorms hanging outside my window…
This might be just the age we are living in.
Casts & Crews
Yu Guangyi
Director
