Yafei Qi








Information

Non People

Cinematography: Kristoffer Archetti Stølen

Format: DCP 4K / 100min. (in preproduction)



Non People is a feature-length documentary focus on Chinese television confessions. China’s forced TV confessions has become a tool for brainwashing the masses and has shaped a certain new kind of predictably obedient society in which wrapped with false news. Sadly, this current trend is not unique to China. Instead, it is part of a worldwide authoritarian turn. The film “Non People” exposes how television has been used as a tool for propagating state policy and how it changed public discourse, and how the advent of television has dissipated public attention to serious matters and the questioning of truth.

The Swedish scholar Magnus Fiskesjö who teaches anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University writes: Today's authoritarians share many things, especially their contempt for the truth, for freedom of expression, and for equality before the law, without which there can be no democracy. They congratulate each other on their purported efficiency in “telling it like it is,” and in “getting things done.” They seek to censor and to “guide” public opinion. Authoritarian China currently seems ahead of all others in monitoring, censoring, and managing public opinion, especially in the successful harnessing of a new digital universe of technologies to suppress dissent. China’s forced TV confessions are closely related to one key element in this authoritarian turn — to go beyond the mere silencing of alternative voices and opinions, and “shape reality.” In China this post-truth manufacturing seems to be not just about silencing dissent, but also — after the loss of faith in Communist ideology — about shaping a certain new kind of predictably obedient society sometimes framed as the harmonious society. Scripting, forcing, and disseminating these TV confessions.