By Jia Jia, published: August 16, 2015 “Stop lighting your candles. Pick up a leather lash, and flog hard those derelict in their duty who treat human lives like dirt.”     For the last two nights, seeing candles across my computer screen, I’ve wanted to burst out with curses: So you’ve got candles, but is that all you’ve got? Or are candles the only thing you deserve to have? Facing the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, and all the other disasters which have cost thousands of lives of ordinary people, do you have anything other than candles? After you burn your digital candles, you’ll just go back to what you were doing, and you have never thought, and will never think, about for whom the […]

Du Haibin’s film “1428” captures a variety of scenes from post earthquake Beichuan in a way that I hadn’t seen before. Even though I was in China at that time, and remember checking the news hourly for days, there was still very little I knew about the conditions in Sichuan at that time. All of the images were being very carefully selected before they were shown on TV, but this film manages to capture everything that was left unseen. The documentary begins just 10 days after the earthquake that killed more than 80,000 people, and shows how chaotic life can be as people struggle to know what steps to take next. Many people spent their days trying to scavenge scrap metal from collapsed buildings to […]