Beijing Punk look with wide open eyes and see what we only suspect that we can find in the endless Chinese soil – seeds of musical rebellion. The film Sean Dzhefard they can win easily, because telling stories about human dreams, locked in a trap, the walls of which they angrily tossed. Punk while Beijing is extremely slow and gentle film that for the first time you will see Chinese skins with suspenders and shirts Lonsdale, sworn punks with drawn eyes, leather jackets and shirts of the Pogues, and you will understand exactly what kind of cough syrup to drink before you reach for the Chinese spirit. Without claiming anything more than what is Punk in Beijing has become a phenomenon in a small metal pin, stuck in the skin of the Chinese communist society.In addition to fast-fast namarda list of prohibited sale, distribution and broadcasting productions in China, the film proved to be a problem in Bulgaria. A week after its first screenings in independent art spaces in Sofia by distributors disgrace received an official note from the Chinese embassy, ​​which insists to stop screening. We are glad that Zdravko Grigorov and Angel Hadjiiski from disgrace did not do anything, which also received the full support of director Sean Dzhefard whom almost disturbed at night with our questions.

Read the full review here.

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Atlantic City, New Jersey — At the very beginning, Beijing Punk asks: “What happens when 1.3 billion Chinese discover punk?” Then it proceeds to answer the question — well, not exactly. But that doesn’t matter. This is a fascinating and insightful journey into China’s punk culture, a world few people know about, including the 1.3 billion Chinese. We are taken into their underground clubs, hang with several bands that fuel the Beijing punk spirit, visit their crash pads as they unwind and get ripped and stoned. We witness their anger, their alienation, their hostility, their rebellion.

This intimate and raw film screened at the Atlantic City International Film and Music Festival, which is the festival’s inaugural year. With venues scattered among four boardwalk hotels — Bally’s, Caesars, Showboat, and Harrahs — it makes for an unusual atmosphere for a film and music festival. The competition with the casinos is never easy in Atlantic City, but the festival’s founder and director, John Paxton, is determined to turn Atlantic City into a major festival stop.

As for Beijing Punk, which is quickly achieving cult status among a growing number of independent film goers, the film was received enthusiastically in Atlantic City. At the Q&A after the screening it was clear that the film took a few American former-punkers down memory lane.

But are Chinese punks different from other punks? The Chinese variety have the same spiked hair and leather jackets and tattoos, engage in heavy if not constant drinking and drug taking — codeine and hash seem to be their favorites — and violence is more than tolerated. It appears there is nothing really different about Chinese punks, except they are punks in China.

Yet, didn’t punkdom have a quick death back in the 1970s? And isn’t China tightly controlled by a ruthless authoritarian government? And doesn’t a famous Chinese saying go, “Any nail left standing up must be hammered down”? China may be embracing the capitalistic — “getting rich is glorious,” as they also say in China — yet causing trouble certainly isn’t. So how are punks in China possible? They tip-toe on a razor-sharp line.

The punk bands’ lyrics do not directly challenge the government and it’s closed political system. That would be one fast and brutal no-no and the end of punks in China. Instead, their words attack the amorphous “society” and “culture.” The words are ambiguous and allow hidden meanings to be understood among the faithful punkers, yet allow the authorities to claim the punkers are not saying what they are actually saying. This vagueness allow punk bands in punk clubs with punk fans to exist in modern China.

Growing up in a society where the government is watchful and nervous about popular culture, about anything and anybody that could develop into a challenge to its authority, Chinese punkers are ballerinas on the line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. If they dance too close to the forbidden, the authorities clamp down; seldom is the line explicitly crossed, so they are allowed to exist as an underground entity. Their rage in public, even in their underground clubs, exists without specific targets. Diffused rage is seldom a political threat.

The visuals and audio of Beijing Punk reflect the rawness and roughness of the subject matter. Australian director Shaun Jefford has produced an intimate, at times hilarious, riveting portrait of a group of young Chinese struggling to survive in a society increasingly infatuated with materialism While most of the Western media, even some independent films, focus on the “economic machine” of the East, Jeffords slips us into the lives of those who hate this “getting rich is glorious” machine.

Beijing Punk, then, is not so much about a bygone subculture that today lives in Beijing, but about the arrival of what Chinese authorities will have to adjust to in the future: citizens refusing to follow the official program. This will mean rebellion from the mainstream — nails that refuse to be hammered down! This will mean more Chinese individualism in all its strange and weird forms.

Beijing Punk gives us the Western punk of our past that lives today in in Beijing, and a glimpse into the future of China, a future its authorities would rather not see. And that is another reason to see this very good film.

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Almost four decades since the punk movement began in England and is now exploding in unlikely places for this style, such as Beijing.

Punk music in China is so rebellious and raw as that of their British ancestors.Now Johnny Rotten has a flavor peculiar to China.

The Asian giant is becoming one of the largest factories in the world but not everyone works 12 hours a day 7 days a week. Leijin and members of his band called MISANDAO are an example.Leijin is big, strong, tattooed, and media is also smart.For him and a dozen punks like him, this art form that deals with freedom makes them survive.

Composing lyrics in English and Chinese, the punks of Beijing seem free to innovate and make their own version of a revolt that is more than music and mohawks, is all a cultural statement.Under slogans against police brutality, the wasted lives, the absurd slogans of government and bureaucratic machine, their songs sound familiar but also brand new, but, above all, are full of wild energy and desperate strongly associated with fear and audacity.Punk turns completely away from the image of the Chinese model citizen.And although it is not contrary to law, is anything but socially acceptable in China.

This documentary set against the backdrop of the state of total control and a situation that incites a rebellion in which what is at stake is so important to the bands and their followers.Boasting of freedom and indignation in public spaces and in a country where the Internet and YouTube are blocked by the government, the blatant disrespect that makes them feel young people wake up and act.

The Australian filmmaker Shaun Jefford was inspired by this spirit of defiance and the real situation dangerous to film “Beijing Punk” .Jefford has captured the underground revolution that is against mass culture and the constraints deep Chinese communist regime.

During the Olympic Games in Beijing, Jefford’s small team followed a group of punks and skinheads through a “war zone” on the outskirts of Beijing.A subterranean world that revolves around a small club called D-22 , which has become the meeting point for young Chinese musicians related to this rebellion.

The documentary includes the “antics” of two punk bands and skinheads.The film plunges amid production of myth.Also points to the acute awareness of the lives of the punks.It gives us a look at the will of freedom, but the views and opinions are too politically ambiguous.Today, with over 15 bands and 10,000 followers in China, the angry voice of Oi!, Still roaring strong and authentic.

Beijing Punk transports you to a dark and hidden world full of rebels and misfits that scratch the surface of modern China.

Here you will savor a taste of what awaits you when you see this piece of documentary!

Beijing Punk is an exhilarating documentary about the paradoxical realities existing within 21st century China. With playful curiosity, Australian film-maker, Shaun Jefford, scratches the socialist surface to reveal a hot-headed, discontented counter-culture simmering just below.

Ever since China heaved opened its heavy doors to a curious world media for the 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing has been presented as a clean, orderly city of conservative yet content citizens. Beneath the surface of this communist façade is a growing counter-culture . With playful curiosity, this filmmaker reveals a number of colourful characters with a passion for freedom who are the driving force behind the underground punk music scene of Beijing.

In a country fast becoming the factory of the world, capitalism is all the rage to many – but not to ‘Leijin’ and his band members. A skinhead punk rocker and founder of a band called Mi San Dao (a Chinese word for sweet cream puff), Leijin is a big, tough, tattooed, intelligent media master. Together with other bands such as Demerit with lead singer ‘Spike’, P.K 14 : the thinking-men’s punk band and singer ‘Hedgehog’ with his drummer ‘Atom’ (a 4ft tall girl who goes hell for leather on drums), these musicians exhibit sheer determination to free themselves, and eventually the mainstream, from state control and oppression.

With lyrics in both English and Chinese, the punks of Beijing create their own version of a cultural revolt. They declare their distain for consumer waste, police brutality, wasted lives, pointless government slogans and the bureaucratic machine familiar themes in a new context screamed with raw energy and vehemence that only arises from deep desperation, fear and daring.

Although not against the law, the punk music scene is far from socially acceptable. Flaunting freedom and outrage in public spaces may be an exhilarating exercise in human rights, but can also lead to arrest. As Jefford asserts “These guys are headed for trouble sooner or later, let’s hope it’s later”.

It’s for this reason that the views and opinions belted down the microphone are deliberately politically ambiguous. With more than 15 punk bands and a rebellious following of around 10,000 fans, Beijing youth culture is stirring so be sure not to miss Beijing Punk at the 2011 BBFF.

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There really isn’t a better way to wind down after a very long Friday, at least if you’re me, then with a documentary about Chinese punk music. Yes, really.

I went into Shaun Jefford’s “Beijing Punk” at the 2011 Macon Film Festival expecting a blast of loud, fast fun, and that’s exactly what it delivers, along with a little about to think about along the way. For a little background, Jefford explains at the outset that he took his camera to the Chinese capital in the year of the Olympics looking for an interesting story behind the big one, and finds his centered around the punk club D-22.

He loses a little focus in the beginning with kids who certainly look like punks, but only give him quizzical looks when he asks if they like punk music. Before it slips too far into mockery, though, he finds his groove by wisely focusing on three bands and their stories.

The first, and by far the most interesting (and often frightening) is Misandao, a Chinese skinhead band (let that sink in for a second before continuing), and its frontman Lei Jun. Rather than trying to explain just what a Chinese skinhead would be angry about, Jefford just lets Lei Jun and his bandmates show it as they swig cough syrup by the bottle and eventually talk about Hitler in chillingly neutral terms.

Less scary but more entertaining are Demerit and Hedgehog. The fun in learning about these two young bands is in seeing how the language of punk music is universal and how much it gets filtered through the unique state of trying to express it in a communist state.

The kids of Demerit delight in explaining that they don’t have jobs because “working” in China means putting in 12-hour days, and as they show off their squalid living conditions and declare their absolutely filthy bathroom “punk,” it’s hard to argue with them. The trio Hedgehog is the most musically entertaining of the three groups (but then, I’ve always been a bit of a shoegazer when it comes to indie rock, and they are too), and it’s a hoot to hear the two male members explain the appeal of having a female drummer (who, as almost all female drummers do , kicks all kinds of ass).

All in all, it’s an interesting look at a scene that’s still fresh and on the rise, and a world well worth visiting for an hour or so.

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When Australian filmmaker Shaun Jefford came to Beijing in the midst of 2008 Olympic fever to make the documentary Beijing Punk, punk was already dying in China. As in the UK in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the cry “Sell out!” could be heard in the background. In the UK a steel safety-pin pushed through the nose was replaced by a gold clip-on as a fashion statement. In China, the UK flag, and the de facto symbol of Chinese punk, had degenerated into a logo on a student handbag or an icon to decorate a cash-filled wallet.

But punk doesn’t die; it’s assimilated. Anti-establishment becomes established. According to Leijun, lead singer of Misandao – one of the bands most featured in Beijing Punk – primetime for the movement was 1999, when it all kicked off, before attitudes changed with the lure of commercialism and rebellion made way for the conventional.

So is it all over? Even now, as Jefford’s Beijing Punkgets some of its first showings in Western art-house cinemas, are people seeing the documentation of a dying movement? Perhaps. But perhaps punk – in China as anywhere – was never supposed to last, but rather to serve as a catalyst. As it dies, it has served its purpose.

In 2002 I turned on CCTV to see the highlights of the World Cup one day and was greeted with funeral music. A mournful piano meandered its tearful way in the background to balls being kicked and goals being scored, so I waited for further news of a tragedy. Maybe a plane had crashed with an entire team on board. Maybe one of the stadiums had suffered a terrorist attack and thousands had died. But no – the highlights were over and we were returned to the smiling presenters. Clearly all was well.

I was aghast. Back home, football highlights are accompanied by a musical frenzy as accompaniment to the thrill of tackles made and balls hitting the back of the net to an ecstatic crowd response. But in China? The music says it all.

Stay calm. Don’t get excited. Relax.

Such is the message of nearly all mainstream Chinese pop music. Tear-jerker ballads, maudlin love songs – these are the staple fare for Chinese youth tuning into the nation’s broadcast media. Only brass bands playing patriotic songs are allowed to galvanise. It is so soporific that, as a teacher, I had to ban students from playing Chinese pop music on the computer during lesson breaks; if they listened to it, by the time the break was over they were all muzzy.

I like a good love song but wall-to-wall, with no release from the maudlin soppy-sloppiness of it all, it’s just miserable. A wistful refrain is often there in the background of youth, but it shouldn’t be the whole damned soundtrack.

Exploding into the midst of this, punk was always too alien. Jefford’s film – banned in China, with its trailers and other references often blocked on the net – is a documentary of a movement that was never going to have any appeal in more than a few of the sometimes brightest, sometimes darkest corners of Chinese youth culture; those most open to something new and those most angry and disillusioned. Ornery and challenging in the West, transplanted into China it became a freak; too aggressive, too unconventional and too hard for a love-song softened youth.

However, as in the West, so in China the value of punk is being felt not in its heyday, but in its legacy. The West needed punk to rise and fall to free youth culture from the hands of multinationals and media empires. In the wake of punk, youth stopped merely consuming and started to create, create not only the new sounds through which they expressed themselves but new labels, new media for their distribution. More and more small venues opened up for live music to meet the growing need of performers and audiences looking to create or consume something different. Punk gave way to post-punk, to electro, and then to house and trance. Ska emerged on punk’s peripheries and an edgier R&B sound. People began to make music in their bedrooms or in garages. New music exploded… and precisely the same is happening now in China. Chinese students are eschewing traditional dance classes and buying guitars. Underground venues are proliferating. Bands are producing their own CDs, which they distribute themselves at gigs and through local shops or on the internet. There’s new music, fresh music, original music, music that comes from the heart of its creators and not the soulless product of the media machine. Chinese youth is becoming creative. Very creative indeed.

As with New Music, so too with New Art in general. No longer constrained by conventions, painters are taking traditional Chinese styles and experimenting with them. Chinese painting and sculpture is becoming mischievous in playing with the establishment and art colleges are becoming more inclined to show off star students who not only know the rules, but also know how to break them. More and more of China’s youth now pick up a camera to photograph the absurd, the witty, the informative, the unusual, the emotive rather than lining up their friends in front of some monument on the Chinese tourist trail to flick Vs and smile.

Punk, with its anger and its aggression, was always going to destroy itself. It offered outrage, but no alternative. But in railing against the conventions it has left a legacy of a youth no longer willing to sit back and take what is offered, a youth ever more creative and self-expressive.

Punk was never an alternative – but it has helped to create alternatives. Having done so, as in the West, it will live on forever in the heart of the new.

This week on the show my guest is Australian filmmaker Shaun Jefford. Shaun is the Director of Beijing Punk, a documentary that explores the blossoming underground punk scene in Beijing, China. Shaun spoke with me over the phone from Sydney about his experience making the documentary, and what it’s like for the bands in the film who make their music despite harassment from the government and indifference from the larger culture. In addition to the interview, we’ve got a selection of songs from the bands in the film which include Demerit, Mi San Dao and Hedgehog.

“I am a writer / director and I’ve made feature films and a few shorts and commercials. Sometimes even music videos. I am happiest on a film set.”

Story Alex
Photo image by Thomas Nauhaus
Soundtrack of the report
Union in Beijing
MiSanDao

That’s how Australian filmmaker Shaun Jefford describes himself on the homepage of his website smjfilm.com. After watching the trailer of his new movie, Beijing Punk, we totally understand why ! This must have been an adventure that I (and any member of the Hejorama Team) would wish to live : a quest for truth and authenticity in China during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

As you can guess by the title, Jefford went straight to where the rebellion is growing, with the “punks and misfits” that China don’t want the rest of the World to know about. Heading to the outskirts of Beijing to follow a group of those Chinese punks and Skinheads, he discovers an underground world of Sex, Drugs & Chinese Rock’n'Roll. In the area of Thingzhou, the club D-22 has become the place where this rebellion his partying and expressing its creativity. Note: I made some quick research about the area Thingzhou as they spelled it in the trailer but I didn’t found anything. I think the correct spelling might be Tsinghua as it’s the area where the club D-22 is located. Or maybe it’s a trick from the Chinese censorship… When I have a chance to go to Beijing, I’ll definitely check that area. In spite of being called a “warzone” in the documentary, there definitely seems to be a different vibe that what you’d see in the center of Beijing. And that’s what we look for when we travel.

Most of the characters that appear in the movie are members of the leading bands of the Chinese punk movement. You can see in the trailer, the leader of Misandao, Leijun. If you want to check more Chinese punk scene we recommend : Demerit and PK14

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New York Film Academy Los Angeles instructor Shaun Jefford’s biggest enemy was the police while filming his guerilla style documentary Beijing Punk. Armed with a super 8mm camera, Jefford set out to interview people from the punk music scene inBeijing, a survival strategy for rebellious citizens needing an escape. Jefford claims one of the scariest moments was “the day that my name disappeared from the internet and our little website for the film disappeared from Google searches inChina– that was pretty creepy!” The final cut Jefford chose for the film is relatively tame compared to some of the content from his first rough cut. However, he decided he would rather not risk endangering the lives of the people involved in his film, choosing the safety of his subjects over aggressive journalistic impulses. Yet his film is still extremely strong, screening at the Cambridge Film Festival this past Saturday and again this upcoming Saturday, Sept 25 at 10:30 pm. It is also screening at the sixth annual Zurich International Film Festival the following week, where he will be flown in as an honored guest and Beijing Punk will be in competition in the documentaries section.  Trailers for Beijing Punk can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTBzByvxhwc

TheNew YorkFilmAcademyis an accredited film school and acting school with locations inNew York City,Los Angeles, andAbu Dhabi. We offer courses in Filmmaking, Acting, Producing, Screenwriting, Computer Animation, Photography, Musical Theatre, and More! Students can elect to take our one year, two year, short-term, and evening programs – or earn an Associate, Bachelor, or Master of Fine Arts degree.