Beijing Taxi

Short Synopsis

Through a humanistic lens, BEIJING TAXI is a feature length documentary that vividly portrays the capital of China undergoing a profound transformational arch in an era of Olympic transitions. The intimate lives of three taxi drivers connect a morphing cityscape and a lyrical journey through fragments of a society riding the bumpy roads to modernization.

Description/Treatment

BEIJING TAXI is a feature length documentary that vividly portrays the ancient capital of China going through a profound transformational arch. Through a humanistic lens, the intimate lives of three taxi drivers thread through the morphing city of Beijing confronted with modern issues and changing values. Though each faced with their own struggles with modernity, the three characters radiate a warm sense of humanity. With stunning imagery of Beijing combined with a contemporary score rich in atmosphere, we experience a visceral sense of the common citizens’ persistent attempts to grasp the elusive. Its society is living through enormous contradictions adjusting to a new capitalist system from a Communist-ruled and educated society. BEIJING TAXI is filmed in the three years before and after the 2008 Olympics. Candid and perceptive in its filming approach and highly cinematic and moody in style, BEIJING TAXI takes us on a lyrical journey into fragments of a society riding the bumpy roads to modernization. Though the destination is unknown, they continue to forge ahead.

CHARACTERS
BEIJING TAXI’s main character is the morphing city of Beijing. There are certain characteristics associated with “old Beijingers.” They are laid back, forthcoming, warm and hospitable. They don’t have the insatiable need for material wealth, strive for success or compete among their peers. This “old Beijing” way of life has been challenged by strong economical advances and developments in the last decades. Their values and traditions are put under scrutiny by capitalist rules. The profound changes of Beijing are not only seen in the city itself but also in the heart and minds of its people. The juxtapositions between the “old” and the “new” city are omnipresent.

BAI JIWEN, the oldest of the three characters, knows his capabilities are limited. In his adult lifetime, Bai Jiwen has lived through a Cultural Revolution, the Tiananmen Square massacre, and just in the last ten years an economic explosion blasting China into the global sphere. He feels he has fell through the cracks and caught in the tumults of history. In this new era of cutthroat ambitions, he knows he can’t compete with the younger and more sophisticated generations. Bai has been a cab driver for 15 years. He struggles to keep living a simple life but the life’s demands on him have increased exponentially. He is physically held back by the limits of his health and age. This year, merely five years to retirement he was recently diagnosed with a benign tumor in the stomach. While he rested at home to recuperate, this prolonged medical leave resulted in a suspended contract. Without a contract, he is kicked off of health insurance and cannot afford to get the tests and the medicine he needs to nurture his health. Bai signs another three year contract and gets back behind the wheel on the eve of the Olympics.

ZHOU YI is the jovial optimist. After 8 years as a cab driver he quit in September 07. Like many other Beijing cabbies today, his reasons for quitting were the sharply rising contract and gas costs, and an industry with no future. What was once something he enjoyed as a hobby – driving – had become a burden. He has no major ambitions and enjoys simple pleasures in life. He seeks new opportunities after quitting, but finds himself unemployed for seven months. He finds a job driving tour buses just before the Olympics. During the Olympics, he was assigned to drive tour buses for official Olympics sponsor YanJing Beer. The tour guide on board gives revealing, candid, and humorous expositions on the Beijingers’ perspectives of the Olympic experience and spectacles. More than the other two characters, Zhou manages to hold on to the “old Beijinger” way of life.

WEI CAIXIA is the youngest of the three, yet having been born before the end of the Cultural Revolution, she doesn’t start with the same kind of clean slate as people born after 1980s in China. She holds onto some of the more traditional values like marriage and family responsibilities, but she is deeply provoked by the major rift in social and cultural values introduced by a capitalist modernity. Wei is always restless and hungers for a free spirited life, a life perhaps only imaginable in the China of the last ten years. She is constantly searching, dissatisfied yet trapped in her life’s limits. Her internal conflicts are very much a modern dilemma. She is tantalized by a TV series called “Struggle” where the main protagonists are young entrepreneurial bohemians living a decadent lifestyle in the explosive contemporary art world of Beijing. With an entrepreneurial spirit, she quit driving to pursue a small clothing stall business. The stall had its ups and downs, but experienced a drastic slowdown as the Olympics approached. As her daughter turns 6 and starts grade school, her visions of her future narrows in on her. She must consider the family duties she carries. She starts to shift her hopes towards her daughter.

STRUCTURE AND STYLE
BEIJING TAXI uses the Olympic games as the backdrop for the film. The Olympics is a catalyst for change and aptly the biggest metaphor to mark this era of China in transition. It is the new China’s coming-out party to the world. The taxicab is used as a cinematic device and thread to reveal the city of Beijing and its characters.
There is a strong focus on capturing the visceral through rich imagery and sound, through textures, light and mood. In the cab the shots are often composed to be very tight to generate a real sense of the intimacy of the space. The viewer is simultaneously peeping into a fragment of the taxi driver’s character defined by the edges of the rear view mirror, and zooming out to the more disconnected world outside framed by the window of the car. The private vs. public space, the modern vs. the traditional and the internal vs. the external worlds are some of the dualities that BEIJING TAXI juxtaposes.