In her Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominated film, ‘Ascension,’ Chinese-American director Jessica Kingdon puts a laser focus on China’s conflicting cultures of runaway consumerism and that country’s reputation as the world’s factory. In just under two hours the film races through dizzying images of female workers using blow torches to put the finishing touches on sex toys, then cuts to humiliating scenes of an instructor dressing down students at a school for butlers and then to a Saturday Night Live skit-worthy lesson in the appropriate timing and angle to be observed for a proper handshake or hug to a colleague at a corporate meeting. It would all be laughable if it weren’t so clear that the Chinese are absolutely serious about all of this meaningless cr***p!
Kingdon’s Oscar nomination marks a significant moment in history in its own way. It joins a roster of films in the category that are directed by people of color, for the first time in the Academy’s history.
Summer of Soul, from director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, rescued from the dustbin of history the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, which preserved an historic performance of the likes of Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, The Fifth Dimension (whom most of the audience previously thought was an all-white group), the Staple Singers, Mahalia Jackson, and a pubescent Stevie Wonder, among others. The 50 year-old film was significant because it chronicles an outdoor concert before thousands of Harlem residents at Marcus Garvey Park. City fathers were against staging the concert, because of fears of a race riot, which was common at that time. Some of the groups, like the Fifth Dimension, said they rarely, if ever, performed before an all-black audience and were fearful of being booed.
Another Oscar nominated film, Writing With Fire, is the first documentary feature from India. Attica, hands Showtime its first Oscar nod. The film recounts the deadly 1971 prison revolt in upstate New York from directors Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry, and a long-overdue recognition for Nelson, one of the most distinguished nonfiction filmmakers of our time.
In all, people of color directed four of the five nominated films in the Best Documentary Feature category, a first in Oscar history.
The film Ascension begins with a quote from Kingdon’s grandfather, whom she learned while shooting the film, was a noted poet from Changsha in Hunan province, from which her family fled in 1949.
“When I told my Mom that I was going there to shoot an air conditioning factory, she was like, ‘Oh! You know your grandfather is from there.’ I had no idea, so one of my producers who works with a lot of artists-in-residence in China put me in touch with an historian. My mom was right.
The historian turned up my relatives and some volumes of my grandfather’s poetry that had been preserved at a nearby museum. It was quite moving.
“When we went back to look at the poems and saw what the translations were, I realized there was a parallel about the film and the paradox of progress, even though the poems were written over a hundred years ago.”
Reading the translation of the poems provided a key to the film’s title as well. “One of them was called ‘Ascension,’ and then when I read the translated version, I realized that, at its core, it was about this idea of rising and hoping to alleviate your worries, then realizing instead that there’s only more trouble. So it was this kind of strange echo from the past, and that’s where the film’s title comes from. We decided to kind of bookend the film with that poem.”
Brooklyn-based Kingdon is sort of an anomaly herself. Named one of the “25 new faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine, her debut feature Ascension took last year’s Tribeca Film Festival by storm, winning the Best Documentary Feature and The Albert Maysles Award for Best New Documentary Director.
Her award-winning documentary short “Commodity City,” in 2017, which profiled the world’s largest wholesale mall in Yiwu, China, was shortlisted for a Cinema Eye Honor and has played at over 50 film festivals. Besides the Oscar nod, her observational portrait was also nominated for six Critics Choice Documentary Awards and the Gotham Award for Best Documentary.
Kingdon says that through the making of the film, she discovered her Chinese relatives, whom she never knew about.
In discussion with Film at Lincoln Center Sr.VP and New York Film Festival executive director Eugene Hernandez, Kingdon expounded in her magnum opus. “The film strives to recognize how the contemporary ‘Chinese Dream’ remains an elusive fantasy. This will ring true, particularly for American audiences. I want viewers to experience how capitalism is manifested in a different context.
“My goal is not to single out China as a paragon of capitalist indignity, but to use this ‘factory of the world’ concept to illustrate the daily realities of industrial systems, both in one nation and globally.”
Ascension doesn’t follow a lineal story line, or present its images in any sort of order. “I wanted to create a visual paradox. Places that could speak for themselves that we didn’t need exposition to explain things to the audience, but rather, to let them discover it, just as I was discovering it. “
In many ways, Ascension is unpredictable, which reflects the manner in which the film was shot. “We constantly had to adapt. So many times we would drive for hours to a location, thinking we were going to film one thing, and then seeing something else completely different. Sometimes ideas for the film would take shape after spending time in some of these places.”
Look for Ascension to create a buzz long after the glare of the Oscar spotlight wears off. From MTV Documentary Films and appearing in theatres nationwide and on Paramount+.
