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Wang Bing
The US State Department's Denial
of an Entry Visa to the Filmmaker
Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing was not allowed to attend the Los Angeles Film Festival, earlier this June. FIPRESCI members Robert Koehler and Bérénice Reynaud inform about the incident.
One
of the major events of the IFP Los Angeles Film Festival (June 11-21,
2003) was the North American premiere of the nine-hour documentary "West
of the Tracks" by Wang Bing. The recipient of a Hubert Bals Development
Fund grant, and world-premiered last January at the Rotterdam International
Film Festival, the film recounts, cinéma-vérité-style,
the death of an industrial complex in the Northeast of China – factories
closing and dismantled; laid-off workers; destruction of neighborhoods;
displaced, angry and desperate populations.
Wang Bing was scheduled to attend as a special guest of the festival. However, just before his planned departure from China, the US Embassy denied him a visa.
As members of FIPRESCI, we protest this attack on freedom of expression and international artistic exchange, an attack which continues a disturbing pattern. This incident marks, yet again, another bureaucratic intrusion by the US government (specifically, the US State Department), preventing major film artists from entering the US and thereby directly interacting and communicating with interested American audiences. However, we should remember that, including Dario Fo, Ernest Mandel and Abbas Kiarostami (to name a few), Wang Bing has now joined extremely good company – some of the most talented artists, filmmakers, writers and scientists from abroad to whom the US State Department appears to have a knack of forbidding entry.
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