GZ and Shenzhen

---

Today is our last day in GZ. We have one interview scheduled at Vitamin Creative Space with Xu Tan, a controversial filmmaker and photographer who had some difficulties with the Gov't because his films focus on outsiders and the disenfranchised in China. His verite films feature sex workers, drug addicts and one, deemed most inappropriate by Party members, featured several explicit acts from GZ's underground gay scene. I watched several clips from his recent film MADE IN CHINA at Vitamin, and the magic is in his clever editing. He cuts back and forth from a gender-bending sex worker doing exercises on some sort of contraption, to a scene of the Guangzhou skyline, back to the exercise gizmo, than to the dark evening streets, and so forth, all the while lounge-like music pulses in the background. He no longer is allowed to show his work in public, and he downloads scenes onto an illegal website with limited subscribers. Luckily, T Friedman is right- the world IS flat, and I have a disc with several of the scenes in my bag.) Tomorrow, we leave for Shenzhen and an interview with the brilliant Yang Yong.

---