Since the late 1980s, radical transformations of the Chinese film industry and art circles have led to the emergence of a significant body of independent documentary films produced and circulated without the backing of state institutions. This was definitely a breakthrough, since state documentary studios and television stations were the sole producers and broadcasters of non-fiction films in China for more than thirty years. Reforms that gradually adjusted the film and television industries to a market economy in the 1980s and 1990s generated, as a side effect, a grey area in which individual projects could be produced without prior submission to the censorship process. The modest beginning of what has been called the ‘independent Chinese documentary movement’ was initiated by about five individuals producing a few personal films outside of their paid jobs. From the late 1990s onwards, digital cameras and post-production software facilitated access to individual video practices. As a result, this group of filmmakers enlarged and diversified: both amateurs and professionals began shooting independent documentaries on various topics, such as rural life, the elderly, young starving artists, migrant workers and the like. Producing independent works also meant breaking from the conventions of the official documentary film model by filming long and free conversations with ‘ordinary people’, relying on filmic narration instead of a voice-of-god supporting official ideology, and favouring the observational over the expository documentary mode. Presented by their authors as subjective works with a personal touch, these films tended to favour emotion over information.

This brief presentation indicates that the film movement was not only induced by a top-down loosening process of the censorship system, or by the emergence of a market economy. Grassroots efforts to elaborate specific production and circulation methods for independent documentaries were crucial to shaping new practices adapted to the constraints of the Chinese film industry or, more accurately, designed to bypass them. The ever-growing number of independent documentaries, primarily shown at filmmakers’ homes and therefore restricted to the private sphere, prompted later film enthusiasts to organise screenings in privately run spaces, such as bars, art galleries or on university premises. These small-scale, semi-private events organised by unofficial film-related groups established from the mid-1990s onwards eventually evolved into independent festivals in the 2000s. These film activities fall under the category of the unofficial (minjian), and are carried out in physical spaces, as well as on the Internet.