Unmade in China

unmade in china

Documentaries about the production of a movie can go two ways. The film being filmed is completed without a hitch and the studio or distributor puts the “making of…” special on the DVD, or it’s a disastrous shoot and not exactly something executives want to flaunt in the form of a bonus feature. The latter can include docs on films that are miraculously finished (Burden of Dreams; Overnight; Hearts of Darkness) or unsurprisingly unfinished (Lost in La Mancha; It’s All True; the upcoming Death of “Superman Lives”). Either way, there’s usually good reason to isolate all that drama for a separately (or solely) released feature-length work. In the case of Unmade in China, the aim seems to have always been to cover a catastrophe. Director Gil Kofman (The Memory Thief) had already gone to the city of Xiamen to make the movie Case Sensitive, a YouTube-inspired thriller scripted by an American writer and intended for Hollywood but which wound up sold to Chinese film producers. They hired Kofman and a few others from the States to maintain a certain prestige appeal, and the whole thing immediately became a nightmare for the transplanted crew. Soon afterward, Tanner Barklow (producer of recent Oscar nominee The Invisible War) flew over to help chronicle the whole experience.

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