West Lake IDF 2024: What’s in a Name

Although few people outside China have heard of it, the West Lake International Documentary Festival—locally known as IDF, which stands for “I Documentary Fact”—has quickly become the country’s leading documentary festival since its inception in 2017. Organized by the China Academy of Art (CAA), the relatively small three-day event held entirely within a university campus owes this reputation to a combination of factors: (1) the expertise of its organizers, which includes renowned documentarians and producers like Du Haibin (1428, 2009), Hsu Hsiao-ming (Homesick Eyes, 1997), and Ruby Chen (co-founder and CEO of CNEX, a Hong Kong nonprofit for Chinese-language documentaries), all of whom also teach at CAA, and (2) its Chinese name and legal status as a dahui or “convention.” Officially recognized film festivals in China must be registered with the authorities and submit their programs for approval. After the government crackdowns on independent film festivals in the mid-2010s, (semi-)independent festivals often adopt alternative designations such as “exhibition,” “film week,” or “convention” to gain greater regulatory leeway. These distinctions afford festivals like IDF more programming freedom than their state-recognized counterparts, such as the Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival (GZDOC). For Chinese film festivals, a rose by another name smells sweeter.

The 2024 edition of IDF was held on the last weekend of October at the Xiangshan campus of CAA on the outskirts of Hangzhou, the city whose iconic lake inspired the festival’s name. Of the five screening venues, only one was a small standard theater. The rest were repurposed auditoriums and halls, with metal scaffolding faintly visible through the makeshift screens, cardboard panels blacking out windows, and projectors audibly humming in the middle rows. Yet these modest material conditions did little to dampen the enthusiasm of IDF’s audience, a mix of CAA students, Hangzhou residents, and documentary professionals, including many presenting filmmakers. They could be found discussing what they’d seen and exchanging recommendations while walking between venues or waiting in line at the student canteen. The result was an almost tangible sense of intimacy, the kind of atmosphere that only smaller festivals seem to be able to cultivate.

Over the past few years, IDF has made a name for showcasing formally innovative and thematically diverse works from around the world. This year’s lineup was no exception, featuring socially critical and politically charged films from Armenia (1489, 2023), Ukraine (Fragments of Ice, 2024), Iran (My Stolen Planet, 2024), and Iraq (Immortals, 2024) that are hard to find at other festivals in China. In total, there were 44 films across two sections, with most screenings followed by in-person Q&A sessions with the filmmakers. The jury, which included Kevin Macdonald (One to One: John & Oko, 2024), Kaori Oda (GAMA, 2023), and Zhou Hao (The Chinese Mayor, 2015), was equally noteworthy and international. 

This open-mindedness extends to other aspects of the festival. IDF remains one of only two festivals in China (alongside the FIRST International Film Festival in Xining) that processes press accreditation requests from freelance foreign media workers like me. Another defining feature of the festival is the IDF Forum, which this year comprised five panels and lectures—of them, I attended only the Asian Documentary Alliance Forum. Established just two years ago, the Asian Documentary Alliance is a collaborative platform connecting festivals and industry events across the continent, including IDF, the Macao International Documentary Festival, and Tokyo Docs. 

According to the festival booklet, the forum aimed to tackle questions such as: “How do documentary creators balance global appeal with the delicate expression of regional culture?” and “What are the best ways to reach audiences in an overwhelmingly diverse and oversupply situation?” Despite its promising premise, the session fell short of expectations. One speaker more or less showcased their portfolio, with little connection to the forum’s theme, while another spent considerable time recounting decades-old experiences working on commercially driven TV documentaries in an entirely different national context. I left the forum thinking to myself that knowledge sharing doesn’t work well if the knowledge shared is irrelevant, outdated, or common.

There was other evidence of organizational difficulties. During the festival’s press conference, Ruby Chen attributed the one-month-only submission period to funding challenges and the resulting delays in determining the scope of the current edition, which was the second year without the industry pitch section. According to the festival statistics, IDF received 613 submissions and held rigorous preselection meetings in person on the CAA campus with four preselectors leading discussions with graduate students. This structure of inviting professionals to work in a two-stage selection process is common in China, where festivals often don’t have permanent programming staff. It’s commendable that IDF organizers prioritize community building, live conversations, and meetings—not only between filmmakers and audiences but also among filmmakers themselves—even while the festival is facing financial difficulties. 

This year’s Best Chinese Documentary award was given to CAA MFA graduate Huang Rouyi’s deeply personal verité Anĝelo in 1948. In the film, Huang’s parents pore over his great-grandmother’s diary, in which she has confided her anguish over living with an unfaithful husband while being pregnant with their seventh child. Prompted by their discoveries, Huang’s parents debate the essence of love and marriage at their dinner table. Although his father’s conservative tirades—which insist on generational, gendered, geographical, and cultural differences, and always on the superiority of traditional, patriarchal, and “Eastern” family values—elicited much laughter from the relatively young audience of IDF, Huang for his part keeps a balanced, even detached, stance in presenting his parents’ conflicting views. He eschews voiceover narration, instead presenting large portions of the diary through subtitles, animated overlays on the diary pages, and accompanying photographs. 

The result is a film that one could read as much as watch. This choice of presentation has a particular aesthetic drawback: The subtitles take up nearly one-third of the screen in some scenes. But as he explained during the Q&A, Huang’s attempt to make the audience actively read rather than passively listen serves his understated approach well. The silent encounters with the agonizing diary entries are succeeded by scenes in which Huang’s displeased mother dismisses her husband’s reactionary idealization of a woman as a tolerant homemaker. She does so vocally at the dinner table, instead of confining her exasperation to written and hidden words. These confrontations, however, are followed by shots of her quietly mopping the floor or cooking alone and of him smoking in his study, sipping tea. Through these poignant juxtapositions, Huang’s film suggests that the dominant views on Chinese women’s place in society and at home still have a long way to go in a progressive direction.

Another observational feature centered on a filmmaker’s family member was Wang Chao’s Jury Award winner Flames, White Snow, Yellow Roses. Over three years, Wang films his uncle Zhanyi, an unemployed bachelor in his 50s who scrapes by, renting out rooms in a ramshackle bungalow in Northeast China’s industrial rust belt. Whereas Anĝelo in 1948 employs static indoor shots, Wang opts for handheld camerawork and intimate close-ups, following his uncle as he collects rent and buys vegetables from street vendors. “There’s nothing to film here,” a peddler quips at Wang—but both he and the audience know otherwise. Flames is punctuated by poignant moments throughout its quotidian essence. Zhanyi recalls the sweeping factory layoffs in the late 1990s, when China’s economy transitioned from heavy industry to manufacturing and services, which left him with overvalued mall display items in lieu of severance. In another scene, he becomes emotionally and financially entangled with a younger woman who works as an insurance seller, only to later end up alone, chain-smoking at home and blasting songs of unrequited love. Wang’s unvarnished yet tender portrait of his uncle also doubles as a snapshot of small-town life during the pandemic. This backdrop remains largely understated—Zhanyi is not the type to diligently wear a mask—until the film’s emotional climax.

The noncompetitive section of IDF also boasted some quality offerings. Perfectly aligned with the festival’s theme, “Co-Existing,” was the opening film, Park Jeongmi’s Blanket Wearer. Using a GoPro strapped to her chest, the first-time filmmaker documents two years of her life after deciding to live without money—a radical response to the disillusionment she felt from working at an exploitative Korean company in London. As Park puts it, “being reckless is better than being helpless.” Guided by many others who have embraced similar alternative lifestyles, Park starts squatting in abandoned apartments and dumpster-diving London’s restaurants. 

Park’s discoveries may prove particularly eye-opening for Asian audiences, as it did for me. Through her friends and the Radical Housing Network, a network of activists fighting for housing justice, she finds a staggering number of unoccupied buildings whose owners would rather have them slowly disintegrate than allow squatters, and piles of edible food discarded on the sidewalks. The audience in my screening collectively gasped at a scene in which Park finds a box full of avocados left on the street. If the first half of Park’s film wrestles mostly with the politics of how an equitable redistribution of wealth can solve people’s basic needs, the second half, when she hitchhikes through Europe and Asia, turns more philosophical—shifting from exploring different ways of living to different ways of being. The events we see in the film occurred a decade ago. Park’s reflective voiceover narration adds depth to the film, transforming it from a quirky two-hour travel vlog into a thoughtful meditation on purpose, belonging, and the feeling of being lost that so often accompanies the feeling of being liberated.

The theme of social inequality can also be found in filmmaker and critic Wang Yang’s The Dream of Super Bridge. While shooting promotional content for a Chinese bridge construction company in Wuhan, Wang decided to embark on a side project documenting the lives of two middle-aged workers of the company: Ma Wenbing, a migrant worker who worked his way up to chief engineer, and Weng Yinan, the oldest migrant worker on the site at 58. The two men differ in age and class, but they share the same pressure to work tirelessly to provide for their families. Although the themes and setting of the film recall Wang Bing’s monumental works, Wang Yang and cinematographer Xue Ming go their own way in terms of style. Xue’s subtle camera movements while filming the river, which creates a tranquil floating rhythm, are contrasted with Wang’s quick-cut editing during scenes of the construction work, heightening the sense of anxiety that mirrors the workers’ fast-paced, high-stress routine. Similar visual contrasts are made later in the film between the immensity of the nearly completed bridge, the largest on the Yangtze River, and the individuals who have erected it piece by piece. 

In one poignant moment, Ma shares his dream of buying a car and taking his family on a tour of all the bridges he has helped build across China over the past 20 years—a period during which he spent a total of only 200 days in his hometown and missed the births of both his children. Meanwhile, Weng laments that 20 years of his salary isn’t enough to buy an apartment. During the post-screening Q&A, Wang revealed his hesitation to submit Super Bridge to larger festivals due to fear of potential legal action from his original employer, whose harsh treatment of its workers is laid bare in the film. But in Hangzhou, he appeared comfortable presenting the film and talking to the audience. 

IDF may be small, but it serves its purpose ably.

This piece was first published in the Spring 2025 print issue of Documentary, with the following subheading: The seventh edition of this Chinese documentary gathering offers lessons on independence, conviviality, and risk taking amid state control.

Amarsanaa Battulga is a Mongolian film critic and PhD student based in Nanjing and Shanghai. His writing has appeared in Cineuropa, Mekong Review, and photogénie, among others.