One camera, one two-man crew, 16 poems, about 16 prostitutes and roughly 40 days in Xinjiang were all it took to make the road movie “Poet on a Business Trip.” That, and about 12 years of leaving the footage on a shelf, an incubation period that transformed the film into an inadvertent documentary of a seemingly more tranquil time in the ethnically divided region in western China.
The film, by the Beijing-based independent director Ju Anqi, opens with a poet who declares he has never been on a business trip. He sends himself on one to Xinjiang, and the film follows his travels as he visits prostitutes at cheap hostels along the way. In the course of his journey, he writes the 16 poems, which are displayed in the film.
“Poet on a Business Trip” had its first public screening in China on Sunday at 798 Art Zone in Beijing, three months after winning the award for the best Asian film at the 44th International Film Festival Rotterdam.
When Mr. Ju set out in 2002 with his sole actor, Hou Xianbo, a poet who plays himself, he hardly expected it would take him nearly 12 years to start editing the film footage. Nor did he appreciate that his work would provide a record of everyday life in Xinjiang before simmering ethnic tensions erupted into mass bloodshed and a crackdown by the Chinese government.
Mr. Ju, 39, was born in Xinjiang, the son of two “sent-down youths” who left their home province of Jiangsu in eastern China around 1968, amid the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong’s campaign to have urban students learn from farmers and cure themselves of bourgeois thinking. He said he set the film in his birthplace without any political intentions.
“I never considered ethnic issues,” he said in an interview. “But looking at it now, this actually carries documentary significance. You can see that everything was still in relative harmony.”
Resentment toward the dominant Han Chinese over economic disfranchisement and restrictions on religious and cultural expression had long been brewing among Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking, mostly Muslim ethnic group native to Xinjiang. Recent years have seen several outbreaks of violence. In July 2009, ethnic rioting in the regional capital, Urumqi, left about 200 dead.
Mr. Ju, a fan of Albert Camus, said his purpose in setting the film in Xinjiang was purely philosophical. When he hitchhiked across the region with friends as a teenager, he was startled to discover prostitution thriving along the roads, he said. Most of the prostitutes he saw were Han. Meaning the film to be an exploration of human desire, he decided to immerse the poet in the absurdity of a business trip marked by sensual pleasure and exhaustion.
“People are always traveling across desires. Both the flesh and scenery are things one desires,” Mr. Ju said, explaining why he essentially had the poet confine himself to two things – traveling through changing landscapes and seeking a variety of women.
The prostitutes in the movie were all actual sex workers found at local hostels, Mr. Ju said. All but two people in the film’s cast, the poet Mr. Hou and an actor from Urumqi who appears briefly in the film as a tourist, were local residents.
“Almost everyone was found after we got there,” Mr. Ju said. He said he told the people – truck drivers, shop owners, sheep herders, prostitutes — in general terms what the scenes were about and asked them to play themselves.
What comes across in the film as very unscripted are a Uighur man’s complaints that it has become more difficult to make a living, a herder’s longing for urban life, and the laughter and loneliness of prostitutes. The poet’s reactions feel similarly unscripted – the joy of watching Uighurs and Han singing and dancing, and the fatigue, weeping and sexual impotency in a final scene; largely, Mr. Ju said, a result of 40 days of intensive filming.
“Uncertainty was exactly what I was going for,” he said.
Physically and mentally depleted, the director and the poet abruptly ended the filming trip in a dispute that left them estranged for a decade, Mr. Ju said. After bickering over some trivialities, he said, the two parted ways “literally in opposite directions” in the night along a road cutting through the vast deserts of southern Xinjiang.
It was not until 2012, when Mr. Ju and Mr. Hou met again and reconciled in Shanghai, that Mr. Ju thought of completing the film. He had to make the movie in black and white because the color tapes he used in the filming had deteriorated.
Zhang Yaxuan, a Beijing-based film critic and producer who sat on the jury at the Rotterdam film festival, said the fact that the movie was screened more than a decade after it was filmed added to its importance.
“Given today’s political context, coming out 12 years later has enlarged the movie’s dimensions,” she said. “Today’s context has changed.”
She said the film offers people outside Xinjiang a rare chance to witness friendly interactions among Han and Uighurs.
“When we speak of Xinjiang, we always say the scenery is beautiful and there are Uighurs,” Ms. Zhang said. “The place has all been conceptualized, and there are stereotypes. Rarely do we have an opportunity to see what it is really like.”
One man who attended the screening with his girlfriend said they were primarily interested because they had not seen many films set in Xinjiang.
“I’ve never been to Xinjiang and always think the place is quite mysterious,” he said, giving only his surname, Wang. “And probably also a bit chaotic.”
“And this poet finds prostitutes along his way, that is pretty appealing,” he said, laughing.
Mr. Hou, who goes by the pen name Shu, which means the vertical strokes in Chinese characters, recalled the closeness he felt to local people during the filming.
“The way Uighur people showed their friendliness was to borrow your cigarettes and say ‘Uighurs and Han are all one family,’ ” he said.
“Differences, estrangement and coldness were not that deeply felt there,” he said of Xinjiang in 2002. “I felt the interactions between people were better than those in Beijing.”
Follow Vanessa Piao on Twitter at @VanessaPiao.