Dirty Fingernails, Dusty Knees and We All Learn Something

I feel like I have spent this week wholly on my hands and knees flicking through pile upon pile of dusty dirty plastic sleeve encased DVDs. I can't possibly have spent a full 7 days doing that, and yet...

One stays in China for a certain amount of time and finds oneself becomes a little more "local" in the way one operates - at least that's my current excuse and I do believe I'll be sticking to it for now. Amongst the myriad of activities that I fill my time with here, nestles our film club, where every so often with timely irregularity we screen films in a small cafe in 798, the art district.

A quick rewind and recap to summarise my 17 months of film based adventures: there are a whole host of reasons that most films from most countries don't make it to cinema screens here, suffice to say the result is that the cinematic landscape is as barren and dry as, well, as the rest of the city in the height of the airless summer days. And so it happened that mere weeks after my arrival with nary a clue as to how best involve myself with getting back on the filmmaking horse, I started plotting and scheming and planning and dreaming for ways in which to adorn this city with cinematic baubles.

Having never worked with any UK based film festivals, galleries or other forum for the public sharing of films, I can't accurately compare the experience with doing it China style. But things here certainly feel more loose and fluid than the health and safety happy environment at home. If you do business out here you might start getting anxious at the apparent lack of planning, organisation and general forward thinking. But you would start to go mad if you stayed in your British/ Western head. And so you become used to doing things in a new way, you don't quite plan every small detail. You start to think things will just fall into place. You relax. You take your eye off the ball. But, dear reader, beware, as a wise fellow recently said to me "assumption is the mother of all fuck ups". This is how I found myself, hours before an informal screening in a small cafe, sans advertised film.

I've often tried to explain the prevalence of pirate DVDs here by saying to friends "I wouldn't even know where to buy genuine DVDs". Well, yesterday minus one vital ingredient to a successful film screening I tried to find out how you buy a genuine DVD, with authentic Chinese subtitles. I failed. I went to every not-quite-legit DVD shop within the third ring road. I failed. I literally looked at hundreds of films and on my hands and knees I went through boxes of uncategorised discs in flimsy plastic sleeves encrusted with grime and I failed. Dirt under my fingernails, dust on my knees, sorrow in my heart and sheer infuriating self-loathing in my head, I picked myself up, mentally bashed myself against a brick wall and showed a different film.

It wasn't the end of the world, and I learned a lesson. Yup. It's like an episode of Saved by the Bell right here, the one where Jessie gets addicted to ProPlus springs to mind, and like Jessie I learned that lesson good. I also learned that the DVD shop in Xinjiekou has an amazing selection, that the man in the art film shop on Nanluoguxiang speaks more English than I realised, and that the DVD shop on the West side of Yaxiu is cheaper than on the East, despite the fact I thought they were run by the same guy.