Drunkard Nursing Home

If you hear talk of an independent, no-budget Chinese documentary shot on digital video called Drunkard Nursing Home, which was edited down to a mere two-and-a half hours from some ten hours of the first cut, you might well imagine a film in the style of Wang Bing: a relentless, extended, fly-on-the-wall record of the appalling conditions in some downtrodden, state medical facility. Well, imagine again. Perhaps it’ll help you to know that the titular ‘institution’ refers to the name of a Beijing nightclub – one that ceased operations just before filming started.

Shuai Zhang’s chronicle follows a number of denizens of this underground as they drift around individually and collectively, looking for (and speculating upon) a new cultural ‘scene’. The post-punk music they love proclaims slogans of resistance and revolution, but what we see is the groping for a sustainable lifestyle familiar from much youth culture worldwide. That lifestyle, in this case, involves queer sexual identity, drugs, ephemeral relationships, patched-together fashions, weighty discussions of art and theory, the tasting of foods, and copious amounts of alcohol. Zhang is very much an insider of this world: as part of the roving gang, he frequently refers to the act of filming and its effects. The portrait of a dissolute but not entirely unhappy generation, Drunkard Nursing Home offers unvarnished authenticity.

– Adrian Martin