Why we rename our #documentary as #IronMoon? Anyone remember #Xulizhi? Have you ever seen the word #IronMoon? No? Because it only came from Xu’s work. What’s #IronMoon? #Xulizhi told us that "They refer to it as a nail". Nail is trivial to the image of an ordinary industrial worker. But what’s the behind? It’s the oppressive situation of # MigrantWorker status in China today.
I swallowed an iron moon
they called it a screw
I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms
bent over machines, our youth died young
I swallowed labor, I swallowed poverty
swallowed pedestrian bridges, swallowed this rusted-out life
I can’t swallow any more
everything I’ve swallowed roils up in my throat
I spread across my country
a poem of shame
Hundreds of thousands of people travel from China’s countryside to its cities to work in factories, building devices for international consumers and trying to assemble better lives for themselves, and a few of them, like #Xulizhi, manage to write about their experiences in deeply moving ways. #IronMoon follows five of these worker-poets through their daily lives, showing the pressures of their work, and the poverty in which many of them survive.
Meanwhile, #IronMoon is the first in a series of three #documentary films and three corresponding anthologies of poetry that will continue the stories of the first. #IronMoon has already won major film awards in China and Taiwan, and been shown more than 500 times across 112 cities. In online forums and messaging apps alone, discussion of the film has reached more than 80 million people. It’s fair to say that with their first film, and without the support of major distribution or box office profits, filmmakers Qin Xiaoyu and Wu Feiyue have created a true cultural phenomenon in China.
