Zhu Rikun spent months planning a film festival that never happened.
As the director of the inaugural IndieChina Film Festival, Zhu was set to welcome filmmakers and directors from China to New York City for a small showcase of independent Chinese films this week, but he said concerns over harassment led to the event’s suspension two days before it was scheduled to start on Nov. 8.
Every day this week, Zhu has been showing up to the empty venue he had booked for the film festival as a form of protest.
“It was not the film festival that I prepared for,” the filmmaker told NBC News on Friday morning.
In a statement ahead of the film festival’s cancellation, the organizer said he received messages saying that filmmakers, directors and producers from China set to participate in the event, as well as their relatives, were facing harassment.
Many participants who pulled out of the independent film festival did not say why or cited “personal reasons,” but a few said they or their family members had been told to do so by Chinese authorities, according to Zhu.
“I hope this announcement of the cancellation of IndieChina Film Festival will make certain unknown forces stop harassing all the directors, guests, former staff, volunteers and my friends and family,” Zhu said in a statement on the festival’s website.
By the time Zhu suspended the film festival, it was too late for him to cancel the venue he had booked. Throughout the week, he has gone to the event space — sometimes by himself or with a handful of other filmmakers — to watch some films and discuss them.
“I am still a filmmaker. I’m still a filmmaker from China and I’m still an independent film curator,” Zhu said, adding that independent filmmaking in China “is really difficult; it is extremely different from before.”
Before moving to New York City a decade ago, Zhu had worked on independent film festivals in China for nearly 20 years and co-founded the Beijing Independent Film Festival.
But independent film festivals in China began facing increasing crackdowns after Chinese President Xi Jinping, known for his stringent ideological control, stepped into power in 2012, according to Human Rights Watch. The nongovernmental organization investigating human rights abuses around the world has said that Chinese authorities have shut down all three major independent film festivals in China, including Zhu’s Beijing Independent Film Festival.
“Eventually, all of my film festivals were banned, none of them could continue,” Zhu said.
Following what happened to his film festival in Beijing, Zhu had been rethinking how to host a film festival focused on Chinese independent films that could avoid censorship — the New York City event was the first attempt at that.
“The Chinese government reached around the globe to shut down a film festival in New York City,” Yalkun Uluyol, China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “This latest act of transnational repression demonstrates the Chinese government’s aim to control what the world sees and learns about China.”
The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to an NBC News email seeking comment.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry told The New York Times this week that it wasn’t familiar with the specific circumstances around the IndieChina Film Festival and that Human Rights Watch had “long been prejudiced against China.”