It's early morning as a middle-aged man helps his wife out of a tent in a Beijing park and into a wheelchair. The camera zooms in to show the woman, wearing red pyjamas, combing her hair and brushing her teeth by the gutter. The husband packs their belongings into large plastic bags and they move on. The woman is Ni Yulan, a lawyer who was so brutally tortured by police she can no longer walk. Three months after being released from her second prison term, the couple camp out in Huangchenggen Relics Park in Beijing because the police won't allow them to settle anywhere.
Ni's crime? Defending Beijing residents whose homes were demolished to make way for the 2008 Olympics. Ni tells a horrifying story of physical and mental abuse while in captivity.
The documentary, Emergency Shelter, is the work of He Yang, 40, an independent documentary maker and former cameraman for state broadcasters CCTV and Beijing TV, who this year has made three daring films about the plight of human rights lawyers and their clients on the mainland.
Cui Weiping, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy and an outspoken intellectual, praises her former student. 'He Yang's three films are about social movements and they're quite exceptional,' she says. 'They're also very important because they represent the legal situation today as it moves forwards and backwards.'
He studied at the Beijing Film Academy then worked at the state broadcaster for two years before quitting in frustration. 'They pored over your films and eventually you just didn't do certain stories,' he says. 'I felt a lot of things were safe, but the editors worried a lot.'
He turned to making independent films about minority groups in southwestern China. His career took a dramatic turn, however, when he hooked up to the internet and learned about the plight of the mainland's struggling human rights lawyers.
