Channel Zero Media Inc.

The documentary filmmakers' struggle in shanghai (reprint from:Shanghai Daily)

The film records the long summer of a 16-year-old girl, whose father disappeared shortly after divorcing her mother. The girl is waiting to go to court against her mother for abandonment, and she is going through a bitter relationship with her boyfriend.

The film combines the girl's monologues about her memories with pitch-black screens and footage of daily life. Directors Ke and Guo Jing manage to maintain the suspense as the audience keeps wondering why the girl is going to court against her mother.

But the documentary is difficult for average audiences to follow because of deliberate choices by the directors who ignore the convention of a clear storyline or theme, typical in most films or documentaries.

The film is very long -136 minutes - and contains no background or explanation. The girl is drifting through the plotless summer. The film is shot as events unfold. "A Fruitful Summer" is completely unscripted.

And long takes of the girl wandering through streets in her daily life become tedious. It contains no clear message, no blame for her father and mother who abandoned her, as one would have expected.

"Although we know that once you turn on the camera, nothing is truly objective, we still wanted to record the true facts as much as possible, without our intervening in the girl's life and trying to tell everyone who's right and who's wrong," says Guo.??It's hard not to agree with Ke's view that most audiences won't like the film. Both directors work at a local television station where documentaries are usually engaging, with clear messages and storylines.

The two had to fund this themselves. Some of their colleagues suggested a more conventional and saleable approach - help the girl search for her missing father. In this way, the girl's difficult search could easily keep the audiences engaged and the moment of reunion with her father would be moving.

It is exactly commercial TV's effort to accommodate and interest the audience by shaping reality in a documentary that made Guo and Ke take the opposite direction in "A Fruitful Summer" - their first documentary on their own.

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