Response to The River of Life

On Saturday, November 8, I had the opportunity of attending Panel B: Beijing Independent Film Festival: 
The River of Life, a film documenting the life of a lower middle class family in a small suburb in China. Since the film was documented by one of the family members, Yang Pingdao, the viewer can get a true sense of the family’s everyday life – their struggles, hopes, fears, and the interstitial dynamics between family members. The three most prevalent themes that encompassed this autobiographical documentary were, life, death, and marriage.

While Yang Pingdao, a struggling writer, is trying to make ends meet, especially since he and his girlfriend are expecting a newborn, his grandmother is extremely ill and lies on her death bead. In addition, he is on a quest to find his father’s grave, which he had never visited since his father’s death, so he can revive a religious ritual of asking for blessings and to be a respectful son.

What I like most about this film is that it is nonfictional, in its purest form. It portrays the everyday life of a middle-aged Chinese male, who happens to be a son, a grandson, a boyfriend, a father, and later, a husband. He tries to preserve family tradition, keep his ties with his grandmother who has a hard time identifying who he is, and be a faithful husband, despite his wife’s continuous suspicions of a hidden love affair with a former classmate. Although the culture exposed in this film, Chinese, is different from my background, the similarities far outweigh the differences, making the film very relatable as far as family dynamics is concerned.

Project #2 - Audio Interview

For our second project, Audio Interview, I had so much fun interviewing Naiche, who blogs frequently on The Book Girl and aspires to be a young-adult literature author.
Full interview can be found here.  

An Evening Stroll - What I Hear...

An Evening Stroll - What I Hear...

I live in Woodside, Queens, a quiet neighborhood surrounded by two cemeteries. The day I chose to do my recording was Halloween - though that barely made a difference. I chose this neighborhood specifically because of the aforementioned reason; it lacks a lot of night life, granting me an opportunity to listen to the environment more intimately. The sport of contemplating my surroundings, wherever I go, is far from foreign to me. However, with this exercise, it was interesting to view the outcome as I zeroed-in only on the sound.

The stream of audio I recorded does not do the experience any justice. Though you choose to focus on the sound and attempt to “slow down psychologically,” you inevitably feel the wind on your face, blowing away your Hijab occasionally, and thoughts of how magical the night is occurs to you, stopping abruptly when a car swooshes by and you remind yourself that you need to listen.

That said, the sound of my neighborhood was multi-layered. The background, or keynote, was mainly composed of the sound of rustling leaves, flapping slightly forceful, on the occasion of an evening breeze. On top of that, there was the swooshing sound of cars passing by, which created a sound effect that I seldom paid attention to – their sound wave resembled a hill, with a very low pitch as you view them afar, increasing as the car approaches, and gradually fading away as the car drifts by. In addition, I caught a couple of drizzling drops on my way back, which created a harmonic sound effect as they dripped steadily on concrete.   

This exercise was rewarding in that I was outdoors listening solely to my surroundings, meaning no appointments to rush to, or class to catch, just a stroll to purely listen to what happens around me on an everyday basis. If I were to do this exercise again, I would record in a more populated area where I can perhaps record a story or scenario that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.