[PR] WASTED ORIENT - Chinese Punk Rock Documentary - DVD Out 9/25!
- ***NOTE: It appears that this information was copied directly from Plexifilm's homepage (www.plexifilm.com)
WASTED ORIENT
a film about JOYSIDE by KEVIN FRITZ
COMING TO DVD SEPTEMBER 25th!
“Joyside are the alcoholic, poverty-stricken frontrunners in China’s just-sprouting punk scene.” - City Pages
“Wasted Orient debunks the perception that most of the country is
looking toward a hopeful and prosperous future.” - The Patriot News
“A hearty, greasy helping of Chinese subculture…one that is best consumed with a few beers.” - China Daily
WASTED ORIENT is the story of Beijing punk rock band JOYSIDE and
their first tour in a country not exactly ready for rock n’ roll.
Obsessed with Johnny Thunders and the philosophies of American punk,
Joyside decide to spread their beer-soaked message of apathy across the
countryside, filming every minute of it. The boys share their views of
a bleak modern China through interviews in public toilets, countless
binge drinking sessions, and in their songs (”I Don’t Care About
Society!” “I Wanna Piss Around You!”). Director Kevin Fritz captures an
equally hilarious and uncompromising view inside a Chinese subculture
through a group of silly, sloppy and hopeless punks, outsiders in their
own country.
Born and raised in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Kevin Fritz got his
start editing tractor maintainance videos and applied for an overseas
scholarship as a joke, ending up at China’s prestigious Peking
University to study Chinese. He met Joyside in 2003 and began filming
their tour that same year.
DVD EXTRAS: Deleted Scenes, Outtakes, Vomit, Lo Mein, and more.
CREDITS: DIRECTOR/DP/CO-EDITOR Kevin Fritz EDITOR Renny McCauley
MUSIC SCORE Mario Russo & Andy Zubko PRODUCER Zhang Yang ASSOCIATE
PRODUCER Karla Norgaard PRINT ART Mike Miles & Jon Yankowy
SOFTWARE/TECH Li Bin, Xu Feng & Zheng Tao THANKS Tian Yi Fu MANAGER
Lao Xu
Joyside is Bian Yuan, Liu Hao, Fan Bo, Xin Shuang & Yang Yang
An Uncle Crabby & CookieWise Production
CHINA, 2007, 92 minutes, Color, Video, 1.33:1 (original ratio),
Chinese (w/ English subtitles) Catalog # PLX-030 UPC: 082354004125
Price: $19.98
Monday, June 11, 2007
***COURTESY: SOUNDTRACKS FOR THEM...CLICK ON PICTURE BELOW FOR LINKChinese Rock and Movies At NXNE
Alongside
panel discussions on how bands can grind the best use out of their
myspace, the NXNE organisers put on a sequence of movies related to the
industry over at the Toronto Film Board Building. Kevin Fritz's Wasted Orient was a quick paced look into disaffected youth in modern China, going on the road with Joyside
the director documents the Chinese punk scene in all its drunken apathy
as it turns its back on society with anthems like "Johnny Rotten" and
"I Want Beer" that celebrate a nihilism born out of a hunger for
western culture. Rock and roll as they described it is an "addiction to
chaos," most of this hour long flick was spent in pursuit of getting
trashed with all the skills of four Chinese Pete Dohertys.
TORONTO SCREEN
SHOTS
Covering film in Toronto
Wasted Orient (Director: Kevin Fritz, USA, 2006): I’d seen the trailer for this on distributor Plexifilm’s
site a few weeks ago and was really happy to be able to attend the
film’s first Canadian screening. Joyside are a Chinese punk band based
in Beijing and the film follows them on their first tour. This being
China, the band starts with a 15-hour train ride to Guangzhou in the
south of the country, and the long journey gives them plenty of time to
drink. Drinking seems to be the constant in the film, and one gets the
impression that anything more illicit than beer and gin may be simply
out of their financial reach. Despite their constant state of
intoxication and their aversion to bathing, the band are actually a
likeable bunch of guys who are relatively proficient musicians. They
name-check, either in interviews or by playing covers, many of the
early punk bands and personalities from New York: The Ramones, The Dead
Boys, Johnny Thunders (It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase
“Chinese Rock”). And these guys are punk in that early, primitive
sense: they’re nihilistic, but they’re not mean, or political. They
just don’t see the point in pursuing the lives their parents or polite
society would prefer for them. In that sense, they’re not much
different from their idols. But, of course, this is China.
Other critics (mostly Americans, I suspect) have played up the
“Communist” angle, with variations on “Rockin’ in the Unfree World” and
that sort of nonsense. The truth is that modern China may be more
capitalist than North America, and what Joyside is rejecting seems to
be materialism and the appearance of success more than anything else.
The film is very raw, and one or two people in the audience found it a bit too much and left. But I was riveted.
Kevin Fritz has lived in China for several years, and got to know the
band very well, so he has really captured a level of intimacy that
hardly seems possible for an “outsider.” The beer helps, though, as in
scenes where he features each band member in a drunken one-on-one with
the camera. A bit surprisingly, each comes across as touchingly earnest
and even a bit maudlin.
Despite the endless beer guzzling, the pissing and vomiting, the
rude gestures and the poses of despair, these are just four young guys
trying to make sense of their circumstances. It doesn’t hurt that they
can rock out, too.
(7/10)
XL Recommended - 'Wasted Orient: A Film About Joyside':
Alamo Drafthouse's Music Monday unleashes this documentary about
Chinese punk rockers Joyside. The theme: "Rock and roll is addiction to
chaos." In case you were wondering, yes, punks are pretty much the same
all over the world: They drink too much, they vomit in gutters, they
play show after show. But China seems perpetually on the verge of
massive social change and these guys are a part of it. Local punks
Black Panda play before the screening.
— Joe Gross
From originalalamo.com:
Members of the popular Chinese punk band Joyside echo one concept
throughout this at times gut wrenching documentary: "Rock and roll,"
one of them states simply, "is addiction to chaos." This film explores
that idea and illuminates not only a genre (punk) that celebrates that
chaos, but an entire generation that languishes in it. Fan Bo, Liu Hao,
Bian Yuan, Yang Yang, and the rest of Joyside come to vivid life as
they tour modern day China and settle in to their disaffected skins.
There are no easy answers here-questions about national identity,
friendship, hard economic realities, and aesthetic authenticity subtly
emerge amongst hundreds of beers, layers of filth, rock star swagger,
and some astounding punk rock shows.
courtesy of originalalamo.com
marketing in the digital age, humor, pop culture, the just plain random
Punk Rock Alive & Well in China February 15th, 2007
Wasted Orient is about the Beijing-based punk band. Named Joyside, the camera portrays these rockers warts and all as they embark on their first tour covering mainland China by train from their home-base in Beijing.
The rockers do everything one would expect from a Sid Vicious or Joey Ramone — like chugging beer up one’s nose, eating gross stuff, sleeping and micturating in unlikely places — they just happen to be Chinese.
Not only does this film exemplify the spread of one cultural movement onto another culture, some thirty years later after punk supposedly “died,” and not only does it symbolize China’s up-and-coming status into the world view, it ultimately proves one thing and one thing only: punk rock, no matter how much you say it is, will never die.
[Director Kevin Fritz made the film almost entirely on his own with a barebones budget. This means shooting everything, production, post-production — even translation! He’s an American who’s been living in China for the past several years. He’s a punk rocker himself, having drummed in the regular half-dozen punk bands since high school. Let’s hope this is the first of many films about this incredible country.]
Nine promising points of entry to the 4th Annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival
by Independent Staff
Rockin’ in the (Un) free World
BY ANDY SMETANKA
Wasted Orient
by Kevin Fritz
90 minutes, 2006
Showing: Monday, Feb. 19, 8:30 PM
Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars
by Zach Niles and Banker White
82 minutes, 2006
Showing: Saturday, Feb. 17, 10:15 PM
Punk rock-wise, the People’s Republic of China is trailing the rest of the world by about three decades. Joyside, the Dead Boys of Beijing in Kevin Fritz’s eye-popping Wasted Orient, seem hell-bent on catching up in, like, 10 minutes. Fritz’s doc features more zit-popping, beer-swilling, tune-mangling fun than a dozen tepid capitalist running-dog punkumentaries, and it’s one of two outstanding music-oriented entries in this year’s festival. Wasted Orient and Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars both pose music as a sort of escape, but the particulars are vastly different. A good deal of Wasted Orient’s appeal is in the sense of discovery. The Joyside members themselves are cartoonishly interesting and occasionally endearing, but what distinguishes their chaos—and they’re big on chaos—from the usual noise is the virginity of the territory.
Punk bands in the West have it easy; they have precedent. Joyside members don’t even have indoor plumbing. They tour by train—humorously managing to find the Chinese version of Jay’s Upstairs in almost every city they visit—subsist on bottle deposits and drink themselves stupid. You just don’t get this kind of exotic commentary or vibrant local flavor in most punk docs: “Guangzhou’s food is rotten,” one band member explains. “Portions are small. Cow intestines were okay. The rest sucked.”
Director Fritz packs a lot of action into every frame. Joyside can turn into a pack of monkeys when the camera is on, and when the high-jinks go on for too long you start to wish Fritz would return to the more revealing interview style established at the beginning. Even so, it’s tough to know how seriously to take the band—a strangely sympathetic bunch considering how much screen time they spend trying to be as disgusting as possible.
It’s easy to fall for their vaguely self-pitying no-future routine. The members of Joyside are in it mostly by choice—and certainly more so than the band members in Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars. This eight-member group, one of them a musician with 30 years’ experience who has never seen the inside of a recording studio, banded together as a kind of musical mutual support group, playing reggae-inflected Afro-pop to cope with life in a refugee camp. All are former Freetown residents driven into neighboring Guinea by Sierra Leone’s vicious 11-year civil war (1991-2002), and all of them left family and friends, living and dead, behind in the war-torn city. Two members made it out alive but not in one piece, and their stories are shattering: attacked by sword-wielding rebels, forced to kill children, witnesses to a bloodbath.
With the war over but hundreds of thousands still displaced, international aid agencies recruit the refugee musicians for a “go and see” visit, hoping to seed hope and encourage other refugees to return to Sierra Leone. This homecoming is at the heart of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars. It’s powerful, uplifting stuff; rapt critics have already touted it as the African Buena Vista Social Club, but the travails these musicians have been through puts the lie to such facile comparisons.
WASTED ORIENT to be distributed by
out of New York City U.S.A.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
BY LI WANG
Of The Patriot-News
Filmmaker Finds Drama in Chinese Rockers
For someone who doesn't drink, Kevin Fritz has spent a lot of time around alcohol.
That's because the Lancaster County filmmaker is often with the Chinese punk band Joyside, a foursome who drink beer for breakfast.
"One night I was hanging out at this club, and I saw these guys in the corner just getting wasted," said Fritz, whose 90-minute film on Joyside, "Wasted Orient," won best documentary in this year's Artsfest Film Festival. "Soon I found myself goofing off with them and found out that they were sort of an established punk band. They seemed like a natural subject for a film."
Dressed in a loose polo shirt and a baseball cap over lunch at the Appalachian Brewing Company in Harrisburg, Fritz doesn't look like the stereotypical artsy wannabe indie filmmaker. It almost seems that to Fritz, making movies is simply a path to new experiences. The way he tells it is that he went to China and got lucky finding a subject to film.
Fortunately, the band members were equally enthusiastic to be in front of the camera. Or maybe they just don't care what goes on around them. It's hard to tell, watching Fritz's film. The greasy-haired, tight-jeans-wearing rockers (who sing in English) admit that they are bored, disillusioned with life and expect to be burdens on Chinese society.
Singer Bian Yuan, bassist Liu Hao, guitarist Yang Yang (who is derided for being Japanese) and his eventual replacement, Xin Shuang plus Fan Bo on drums, are seen trying to cope with daily life by foraging or trading for alcohol. In fact, the quest to get wasted seems to take precedence over everything, including making music.
Fritz --- who speaks a pretty decent Putonghua (basic Mandarin) and says he has a Chinese girlfriend who looks like actress Lucy Liu --- accepted a scholarship to study Chinese at Beijing University in 1999. This introduction to the country led him to adopting China as a second home away from Lancaster.
After graduating from film school at Syracuse University, Fritz went back to Beijing University to teach film in 2003. He's back there now shooting a short documentary on the country's primary school education.
In October 2004, Fritz met the band's manager, Lao Xu, and in January of last year embarked on a nine-city club tour with Joyside, which included Wuhan (Sister-city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) and Guangzhou (also known as Canton).
"They smelled pretty bad," Fritz said of the shaggy-haired band mates. "And they all had girlfriends at home and different ones on the road. The crowds were into them. But it was mind-boggling how indifferent the band members seemed about their surroundings. They all appeared 100 percent directionless in a very purposeful way. The whole thing was very ‘punk rock’: there was lots of vomit and piss all the time. Trying to be a rocker in China is certainly not a glamorous life."
In between playing the sonically overblown shows, there are quieter moments, where the band members chug beer over a bowl of noodles and then complain about how horrible the food is. Other times, the rebellious and poor scavengers talk about being disappointments in the eyes of their parents.
In recent years, the Western press has devoted much time to covering the nouveaux riches springing up in modern China. "Wasted Orient" debunks the perception that most of the country is looking toward a hopeful and prosperous future.
"The government definitely does not want too much freedom of expression, but these guys were living at a completely different level," Fritz said. "The way they protested was simply doing nothing with themselves."
Meanwhile, for Fritz, the road to making a living from filmmaking is still an ongoing quest. In an e-mail from China he reports that he is in talks with a distributor who will be selling "Wasted Orient" to television and entering it in film festivals. His next film is about a friend who moved from a poor town in Hebei province to Beijing and now has a job transporting dead foreigners who have accidents or expire from natural causes back to their hometowns.
"It is meant to be hilarious and serious in that it will show the struggles he had to face to get where he is, as well as the sacrifices his family made to help him achieve what he has, plus the pressure he now faces to take care of them," Fritz wrote. "His name is Tian Yi Fu, but we all call him Ralph because at first meeting I couldn't remember his name."
JOYSIDE returns to 
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chaile.org
"Wasted Orient"
Submitted by Adam 2006-06-29.
One of the regular jokes among laowai music fans in Beijing is the prevalence of well-meaning but naive young western students that are terribly fascinated with the Chinese punk scene and ready to write a thesis, make a film, or (ahem) start a blog. "It represents the changing face of China!" With that in mind, I didn't have high hopes when Kevin Fritz sent me a review copy of his film about Beijing punks Joyside. Wasted Orient was a pleasant surprise, though; it's a very enjoyable trip following the gang of drunks on their first tour.
The first portion of the film doesn't stray far from the hutong where singer Bian Yuan and bassist Liu Hao live. Each of the four members gets some time to talk about their daily lives, their homes, and their family, while they buy beer, drink beer, head to the public toilets, and buy more beer. The shots of unglamorous old Beijing neighborhoods surrounded by construction are charming, and enough to make me miss Beijing.
Once the tour itself begins, The band and their manager hop on hard-seat trains, annoy their neighbors, and drink lots of beer. The band members can be quite charismatic. Yang Yang, a Japanese guitarist who joins the band for the tour, provides plenty of laughs, and Liu Hao drinks an amazing quantity of beer. As the tour stretches on, it begins to wear on the band. Bian Yuan withdraws, and the new cities seem indistinguishable.
For a movie about a band it's a shame, but the music is the most disappointing part of Wasted Orient. Joyside's performances have always been hit-and-miss, but there are few shots of the band performing for any length of time and Fritz unfortunately clutters up one of the longer sections with needless effects. Scenes with music have music, but not the band's. Don't get me started on the introduction—the music is grating and annoying. That's something that could have easily been left out.
The film is at its strongest in the conversations with the band members. Near the beginning, Liu Hao discusses what his family thinks of his life. "They think it's strange.... They don't have a clear idea of what I'm doing. They just know I drink everyday and play in a band. They don't know what I am thinking," he says. "I'm also not so clear." Wasted Orient is particularly good at showing the difference between the reality on the ground and the conceits of western reporters who claim that punk rock shows the new face of China. These kids (and they really are kids) don't have their own lives or places figured out, and it's foolish to place any leadership, cultural or otherwise, on their shoulders.
Fritz's work exceeded my expectations completely. Anyone with an interest in Chinese music, or hell, even just China should seek this out. If you're in Beijing, Wasted Orient is showing at Cherry Lane movies this Friday and Saturday.
Wasted Orient Storms Philadelphia
written by Leo Beletsky
Thurs., June 29, 8pm. Free.
Jamaican Jerk Hut, 1436 South St. 215.545.8644
Even before Jamaican Jerk Hut's idyllic backyard patio made its Hollywood debut as the setting for a certain romantic comedy, the 10-year-old Caribbean restaurant had established its cinematic aspirations. On summer nights the owners treat their customers to movies with the wall of an adjacent building as a screen, in a family drive-in kind of atmosphere. This year the practice graduated to a proper film and video series. Ryer Banta, who's curating a weekly program, has focused the series on independent, issue-driven and Philly-based work. Some of the documentaries, features and shorts are well-known, some completely obscure. This week Banta shows "Wasted Orient", a new film by Lancaster, Pennsylvania director Kevin Fritz documenting the debaucherous ways of the most popular Chinese rock band 'Joyside'. As they venture from Beijing on their first national tour, these nihilistic punk rockers find themselves hopelessly disconnected from the provincial ways of their vast, rapidly changing land.
June 20, 2006 - by Beijing's City Weekend Magazine
Cherry Lane Movies
Kent Center, 29 Liangmaqiao Lu. Chaoyang District
Tel: 6430-1398, 135-0125-1303
www.cherrylanemovies.com.cn
If you've ever dreamed of playing in a punk rock band, this film may well stomp on that dream, grind it into the ground and urinate all over it. Billed as the "Official rock 'n roll film of Joyside," Wasted Orient takes an in-depth look at the lives (or lack there of) of this locally well-known band's musicians and wipes out any pretense of glamour one might associate with a rock 'n roll lifestyle. For the members of Joyside, playing rock in China is just one long nightmare with no way out.
Pennsylvania filmmaker and Peking University grad Kevin Fritz (Actually Kevin Fritz graduated from Syracuse University in New York. He did take 2 classes at Peking University however) has been, for a long time now, hell-bent on ripping up the media's portrayal of Chinese pseudo-punks as poster boys for "new China." When he met Joyside, he knew he had found some genuine punks, ones that lived, smelled and rocked like punks, even if the band prefers to label their music as rock. Fast, loud and straight up, the tunes in the film are clearly influenced by the Ramones and Sex Pistols, but with a Chinese spin. And like rampant capitalistic growth of the U.S. or U.K. in the 70s, China's fast track of frenzied development has left many people, including these band members, feeling disconnected, if not wasted.
The film dives into the nightmare headfirst, following the on and off-stage antics and occasional drama of Bian Yuan, Fan Bo, Xin Sihuang, Liu Hao and Yang Yang as they ingest one beer after another and sometimes expel the beer in various ways. After becoming friends with the band, Fritz toured with them across nine cities, braving their aversion to bathing, occasional random insults and general unhealthy lifestyle. Having traveled with punk bands in the U.S., Fritz, who actually doesn't drink, describes the Joyside travel experience as similar.
Wasted Orient serves up viewers a hearty, greasy helping of Chinese subculture's social reality, one that is best consumed with a few beers. While on the whole the film feels too real not to be honest, these colorful characters also know how to be playful in front of a camera, and the tunes they belt out are nothing if not infectiously fun-rocking.
The China screening of the film will be held at Cherry Lane on July 7th and 8th. Kevin Fritz and Joyside members, who have not yet seen the film, will be fielding audience questions after the screening and awarding a prize to the audience member who can best guess the number of beers consumed in the film. Ganbei
"Wasted Orient" (91 minutes, documentary) by Kevin Fritz
(Lancaster):
Four punk rockers from Beijing try to thrive in a government
oppressed society that doesn't love free expression.
HARRISBURG Artsfest rewards excellence in cinema
Monday, May 29, 2006
BY LI WANG
Of The Patriot-News
The winners at The Patriot-News Artsfest's eighth annual Film Festival were announced last night amid sips of microbrews at Troegs Brewing Co. in Harrisburg.
The event, presented by Filmspeak.com and Moviate, is a showcase of emerging filmmaker talent from the midstate to London.
Lancaster filmmaker Kevin Fritz won for best documentary with "Wasted Orient," a look at the punk rock dream in Beijing.
The team of Todd G. Beiber and Juliana Brafa of Lewisburg earned best local film for the horror movie "All is Normal," which stars Linda Blair of "The Exorcist" fame.
Winning in the best narrative and best of festival category was "Heavy Soul," a sublimely effective work depicting life as a teenager in the late 1950s by Brooklyn filmmaker Oren Shai.
The eerie juxtaposition of newsreel images and footage from the movie "High Noon" in "The Life and Times of Robert F. Kennedy, starring Gary Cooper" earned Aaron Valdez of Iowa City, Iowa, the best experimental film award.
A two-minute animated work, "London Onion," a film by Lisa Hutton of San Diego that was inspired by Jurt Schwitters' 1946 poem, was voted the best animated film.
The Artsfest Film Festival continues today. For a complete schedule, visit www.filmspeak.com.
lwang@patriot-news.com ©2006 The Patriot-News
© 2006 PennLive.com All Rights Reserved.
|
Title: | 
"Wasted Orient"--Last Screening this quarter by Modern Chinese Film Club |
Date: | March 08, 2006 |
|
|
Location: | NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY |
Description: | Want to see the REAL China?
"Wasted Orient" is a film by Kevin Fritz -a native of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
While living in China Kevin Fritz met Beijing's premiere Rock N' Roll band, JOYSIDE. This film follows the nightmare behind China's Rock n' Roll scene. Witness the overconsumption of alcohol, chaos, and good old-fashioned punk rock unfold before your eyes. The film is shot from a foreigner's perspective on Chinese society and the growing underground rock community. The title "Wasted Orient" says it all. The guys are wasted on cheap booze and their skills and musicianship are wasted in the conservative environment.
Kevin will tour China and do several screenings. It will also play in various festivals this year throughout the U.S.
For the website of the band,please go to www.joyside.com |
| Li Zeng, Adia Jiang |
| Modern Chinese Film Club (MCFC) |
'Wasted Orient': Rockin' in the not-so-free world
Lancaster County native's latest film explores the lives of the young and disaffected in China
LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - In Beijing, the capital of the People's Republic of China, real rock 'n' roll music is hard to come by.
"The music hasn't caught on in China because the authorities won't let it," said LancasterCounty native and filmmaker Kevin Fritz. "I kind of think in Eastern Europe, two things ended Communism -- rock 'n' roll and Pope John Paul II. Rock music has been a rallying cry for a lot of people, so it's threatening to their leaders."
But the 27-year-old still managed to find a hardcore underground scene in Beijing. One band in particular, Joyside, caught his eye and inspired his new documentary, "Wasted Orient," which premiered at The Chameleon Club on Wednesday.
"These guys were different," Fritz said. "When things are rough, people in the city either just do what they are told, or they rebel and get punished."
"The guys in Joyside are just looking the other way," he said. "They're not fighting the system, but ignoring it. That's their rebellion. Sometimes they get drunk all day and just sit around. They don't measure success like everyone else there does. They just want to play music and get out of China."
Fritz made the documentary for less than $2,000, with a crew of only himself and a camera that he rented for $25 a day. To edit the film he flew to San Francisco where the generosity of former classmates Renny McCauley and Karla Norgaard was shown by donating their floor to sleep on and their time and sweat to edit this film. Also Lancastrians Andy Zubko and Mario Russo added a solid score for "Wasted Orient".
Fritz gets close to the members of Joyside, who are singer Bian Yuan, bassist Liu Hao and drummer Fan Bo. In an almost "Real World" fashion, audiences get to experience the tension between the musicians when guitarist Yang Yang (a Japanese native) is kicked out of the band and replaced with new guy Xin Shuang.
Yuan has a perfect rock star face and swagger that Fritz compares to Mick Jagger. Hao's parents are in the People's Liberation Army and think of their musician son as a failure.
Since only two of the band members have jobs, Joyside usually has $150 to live off of every month.
"They depend a lot on the kindness of friends," Fritz said. "People help them out. When I was there, I let them use my shower. Otherwise, they kind of live like squatters."
There's references to other Beijing bands like rising stars like Brain Failure, an outfit that was lucky enough to be granted visas that permit them to visit America and tour.
"Joyside was invited to play the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas, but they couldn't get the visas to go," Fritz said. "They didn't have the connections."
Joyside sings in English -- with British accents, which could be a tribute to the archetypal punk bands of the U.K. like The Sex Pistols. Though Joyside also admires American punkers The Dead Boys and the Ramones.
"We bonded a lot through music," Fritz said. "We listened to different CDs like Anthrax, Skid Row and The New York Dolls. And I followed them everywhere."
Which wasn't always easy, especially since Fritz had to communicate in Chinese the whole time while filming. As a Caucasian, Fritz was always the minority.
"It was fine, but some people there have never seen a white person before," he said. "When those people glance at you for the first time, you kind of feel like an alien from outer space."
Beijing is China's second largest city in terms of population (7.5 million), and home to countless richly historic sites.
It's also a major transportation hub, with dozens of railways, roads and expressways entering and leaving it in all directions.
"I rode the train with the guys -- in fifth class," Fritz said. "When you get between the cities, farmers start climbing on board with their livestock. But that's how you travel when you don't have money. It's like the Lancaster County express."
But the filmmaker already knew what it was like to be struggling before he began shooting "Wasted Orient."
Fritz majored in film at SyracuseUniversity in New York and later snagged a scholarship to study Chinese at BeijingUniversity (often referred to as the Chinese Harvard) in 1999.
"I really liked the country and the people-although I am always skeptical of their intents-and I got to learn conversational Chinese," Fritz said. "I can't write it very well, but I learned enough to get my point across."
But his interest in music eventually led him to Beijing's underground music scene.
"I was in several bands when I was a teenager," Fritz said. "So music's always been important to me. They were never good bands but they were equivalent or at least on par with Joyside. I finally discovered something called the Midi Festival, which is China's version of Woodstock."
Four years later, he was a film school graduate with a lot of good ideas but no job -- ergo, no steady cash flow to fund his projects.
Lucky for Fritz, Beijing University had an opening. He returned to the school in 2003 to teach subjects like film history.
"They had a need, and I was crazy enough-in the height of SARS- to go back," he said, laughing. "I also did some promotional work for an adoption agency that represents orphaned girls and special needs children. I even had some translation jobs on the side."Fritz, whose debut film was "A Day at the Goat Races," with fellow Lancastrians James Hollenbaugh and Bartek Zytkowiak divides his time between Lancaster and wherever his craft -- or odd job -- takes him.
On Tuesday he was wrapping up filming in New York for his latest obscure documentary about Y-Love, a black Hasidic rapper.
"He sings lyrics in Aramaic, and learned Hebrew and Yiddish when he converted. He grew up Roman Catholic," he said. "I'm doing the film for a German film company."
When he works on personal projects like "Wasted Orient," he has to be more creative when it comes to budgeting --the documentary was funded entirely out of his own pocket and the chance to disrupt his friends' time and energy. "This is no way to live," he says.
"I guess I have a relatively unpredictable life, especially considering most of the people in my family are businessmen," he said. "Doing my films full-time is a dream, but I'm grounded, too. Sooner or later one needs to grow up and make money. As long as film is a small part of my life, I'll be OK."
New Joyside EP coming soon!!!!
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