Following my first viewing of Zhao Liang's Petition at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, my real introduction to China's contemporary independent docu¬mentary culture took place in the years following in small, unofficial screening venues scattered around Beijing. I saw Zhao's other feature-length documenta¬ries, for example, over a series of chilly nights in a small, draughty gallery named Studio X, tucked beside the entrance gate of a former factory in the city centre. The same compound housed Trainspotting Café (Cai Huoche), an eatery that contained a screening room in which independent documentaries and features were shown on most weekends, often with the directors present. Venues such as these have sprung up across Beijing and other major cities such as Shanghai and Guangzhou as China's economy has liberalised, and a substantial private sector has developed for the first time since 1949. Although it took some effort to seek out these venues and their screening times, their activities were relatively open and noted in some of China's more liberal press. Issues raised in the films were openly discussed by audiences following the screenings, sometimes in formal question-and-answer sessions with directors.

This unofficial public screening culture is a contrast to the much more restricted situation into which independent Chinese documentary was born in the early 1990s. At that time, seeing independent works inside China was virtually impos¬sible unless you personally knew the directors and were able to attend their very rare clandestine screenings staged for friends and associates among Beijing's creative circles. Films such as the first independent documentary, Bumming in Beijing, were consequently only seen by a tiny number of Chinese citizens at the time they were made.

This chapter will trace the development of independent Chinese documentary from a marginalised, underground practice in the 1990s to the increasingly public culture of today. This is by no means an exhaustive history of a large and diverse field, but rather a selective account that focuses on the sector's increas-ingly public nature and how this has been reflected in the form and content of the films being made. In contrast to the personalised concerns of Bumming in Beijing and the detached analytical observations of many other key early independent works, documentaries of the digital era evidence a much more interpersonal style intended to foreground the voices and views of the subjects on screen.