In boxing, it’s not about the fight, but everything leading up to the instant fighters step into the ring with gloves thoroughly taped to their wrists.
That’s the message director Yung Chang brings with his documentary film “China Heavyweight.” The film is part of the World Documentary category at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and is slated to premiere Sunday night at 6 p.m. at the Yarrow Hotel Theatre in Park City.
This is Chang’s second trip to Sundance. In 2008, his film “Up the Yangtze,” a documentary touching on modern China and the employment of young men and women on a luxury cruise ship, premiered in Park City.
“China Heavyweight” takes Chang and audience members back to China, this time to rural teenage boxers in the impoverished southwestern part of the country. Athletic coaches from different states travel around the region in search of the next potential Chinese hero to represent the country at the Olympics.
“There is something significant with this film,” Chang said. “With boxing, it is cliché, but boxing is a metaphor for life. This film is a close-up look at the way the country is working and the current inner workings of the society in China.”
Starting in December 2009, Chang and his crew followed the paths of young teens — boys and girls — whose right jab and left hook earned them an opportunity to leave home and head to training centers where boxing becomes a 24-hour job.
In the film, some young boxers fall in love with the delusion of a life-changing performance in the ring, saying they one day hope to go where boxing heroes such as Mike Tyson and Manny Pacquiao ventured.
“That’s a lot of the younger generation,” Chang explained, “skipping that part of what their parents learned: taking the long-circuited path.
“In addition, choices in China, especially for these rural Chinese kids, who are more or less considered peasants, the choices are so much so that the stakes are a lot higher. When confronted with that (decision), it just makes teenagers going through adulthood in a way more universal, leaving family, making a future for yourself. It’s that much deeper.”
Chang is a Canadian-born filmmaker whose parents are from mainland China. He studied film in college in Montreal before attending theatre school in New York City at the famed Neighborhood Playhouse.
How he stumbled across this sports documentary isn’t all that surprising, he said. His producer, Peter Wintonick, pitched the idea and Chang became more interested when he started doing more research on the history of the sport in his parents’ native country.
In 1959, the sport was banned in China after a boxer was killed in the ring. It was also considered, Chang said, “too capitalist, too Western, too violent.”
But in 1987 the ban was lifted and the sport began to flourish.
“We are making that association of boxing again, imparting into the lives of China,” Chang said. “It’s an interesting analysis of a younger generation going through the process of individualism and breaking out of the mold of tradition.”
The face of the film is boxing coach Qi Moxiang, a hard-nosed but inviting leader who consistently tries to help young boxers see their potential, all the while respecting the sport and seeing past the visceral components. Throughout, Qi provides insight of what it means to step into the ring. A former pro boxer now in his late 30s, he is training for an upcoming bout.
“Qi is a brother of mine,” Chang said. “I love that guy. To me, another layer of the film is that idea of mentors and coaches and teachers. I think we’re all, in our past, touched by these individuals who have helped us.
“The kids loved him. He got back in the ring to try and show them, to give them a sense of hope and to never forget that line he tells one of the fighters, “Failure is a noble virtue.”
Just over two years after starting “China Heavyweight,” Chang and Qi will be in Park City promoting the film. Chang said the goal of the film was to simply provide an inviting narrative drama and he hopes audiences at Sundance become entranced by his latest tale.
“There’s so many great boxing films,” he said. “The drama, levels, layers and the dream itself. I’m just hoping the audience will be there beginning to the end.”
“China Heavyweight” is part of the World Documentary category at Sundance and screens: