Hooligan Sparrow director on the dangers of filming in China
New York-based filmmaker Nanfu Wang, whose debut feature is about activists seeking justice for sexually abused schoolgirls, tells Dinah Gardner about the risks in covering controversial issues in China - and living on the streets in Utah for a month for her next film
T I was born in 1985, in a very small, remote village in Jiangxi province. My dad was a huge influence on me; he was a Chinese literature teacher and a great storyteller. He wrote a lot, and he encouraged me to write; encouraged me to be a storyteller, too. We were the best of friends. But my dad passed away when I was 12. He was just 34 years old. He had had a heart problem. Because of the poor health facilities in our village he didn't get good health care. He wouldn't have died if he had better living conditions or if my family had a little bit more money. His death had a huge impact on my life. When I was young, I believed everyone dies in their 30s. I always thought that I would die in my 30s. So that gave me a very interesting philosophy of living, and from then on I thought I had to live my life twice or three times as meaningfully in order to get back the time that was taken from my dad. I've come to the realisation now that I probably won't die when I'm 34 but still I want every minute of my life to be meaningful.
All our financial support was gone after my dad died. We had built up a huge debt to get him medical treatment in the last years of his life. So my mum said we did not have the money to send me to high school or to college - I had a younger brother, who was eight, and my mum said he had to go to school; he's a boy. So I went to a teacher-training vocational school and I became a teacher when I was 16, at an elementary school. I was probably the youngest teacher in the city. But I always wanted to go to college, so when I was 19, I applied for a scholarship to study at a continuing education programme in Nanchang (the capital of Jiangxi province) - it's meant for housewives to get a diploma. Luckily the college shared a campus with the Normal University and I would go and ask the professors for permission to sit in their classes. From there, I applied to go to graduate school at Shanghai University, to study English literature. After I graduated, I started thinking about what I really wanted to do. I wanted to be a storyteller, I wanted to be a writer; that was always my dream, but you can't be a writer overnight.
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My dad always wanted to go out and see the world but because of his disease and his background he never left Jiangxi province. I applied and got accepted at a media studies graduate programme at Ohio University (in the United States) and, after that, to a programme on documentary filmmaking at New York University.