Color/94min/DVCAM/2008
Location: Jilin
By: Yu Guangyi
E-mail: yuguangyi61#126.com

Festivals and Awards：
Independent Spirit Award, Fifth Chinese Documentary Exchange Week
Best Director, Cinema Digital Seoul
Jury Prize, Tokyo FILMex

Program Note:
In the snowbound wilderness of the Changbai mountain range in China's northeastern Heilongjiang Province, we find an unusual family: a hunter, his wife, a vagrant named Xiao Li, two dogs and a cat. They live together in a decrepit house in an abandoned logging camp, miles away from the nearest village. During the winter, they feed themselves by hunting and trapping; in the summer, they raise and sell some of their small herd of goats.
A century of intensive logging has deforested the Changbai mountain range and left its inhabitants, who relied on the timber industry for their livelihood, unemployed and destitute. Xiao Li, reduced to vagrancy after he was laid off from his job, sought refuge with the hunter, who offered him room and board in exchange for tending the goats and doing some odd jobs around the house.
When the government begins clearing away houses to build a reservoir that will supply drinking water to Harbin, a city of over nine million people, the hunter and his household are asked to move. By wintertime, the house has been half-demolished but the family remains: they brave the heavy snowstorms and await the arrival of spring. Just before Chinese New Year, government inspectors investigating reports of illegal poaching find and confiscate the stores of meat that the family has set aside to last them through the long winter. The hunter flees to avoid capture, his wife returns to her parents' home and Xiao Li is arrested, but manages to escape. When he returns to the mountain, frostbitten and exhausted, he finds himself alone once again, with only his pets and songs to keep him company...

Director:
Survival Song was filmed in northeastern China where I was born and raised. In fact, many of the people who appear in this documentary are my childhood friends and neighbors. Since I began making independent films in 2004, my main focus has been documenting the lives of the people who live in the Changbai Mountains. The old ways are disappearing quickly, and I feel a sense of urgency—a combination of nostalgia and a larger sense of social responsibility—to document them before they vanish completely.
A century of felling trees has deforested the Changbai National Forest and left many local residents unemployed and struggling to survive. For those whose families have inhabited these remote mountains for generations, adjusting to life in the outside world—that is, relocating to cities in which they possess no land, jobs or connections—can be very difficult. While Chinese cities have prospered in recent years, inland and mountainous regions tend to remain poor and ignored. Government officials view the mountains in terms of resource extraction and as a valuable source of water for China's growing cities, but pay little attention to the welfare of rural residents, many of whom cannot afford to feed themselves or their families.
Poverty has exposed some of the ugliest aspects of human nature. In certain areas, environmental degradation and resource competition have reduced human society to a pecking order in which each person must struggle to maintain his or her place in the food chain. No longer is there any respect for the age-old “code of the mountains” in which hunters and trappers steered clear of traps set by others. These days, the poachers poach from one another, and anyone who comes across trapped prey is likely to steal it for themselves. Meanwhile, the hunter has become the hunted: even more powerful human predators have set in motion a plan that will deprive him of his land, his home and his livelihood.

Yu Guangyi (b.1961. Heilongjiang)
After graduating from the Chinese Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Yu Guangyi worked for many years as a woodblock print artist. He began making independent documentary films in 2004.

Filmography：
The Last Lumberjack (“Mu bang”)（2004）
Survival Song (“Xiao Lizi”)（2008）