Wu Wenguang is independent Chinese documentary's great survivor. His immediate contemporaries from the 1990s have largely moved into television production, while younger directors committed to filmmaking outside the state media system increasingly find themselves forced to move outside mainland China to survive. But Wu is still working in a distinctly non-commercial manner, and remains based in Beijing. Since 2010, his focus has been a large-scale, participatory filmmaking exercise dedicated to uncovering and recording experiences of China's Great Famine (1958–1961). This venture is known colloquially as the Memory Project, and it lies at the heart of this edited collection.

Four of Filming the Everyday’s ten chapters deal exclusively or primarily with material from the Memory Project, in particular the films of Zou Xueping and Zhang Mengqi. The collection also concludes with a 13-page appendix (“Memory/Document: In Dialogue with Wu Wenguang's Memory Project”), the transcription of a roundtable discussion that took place at the San Diego workshop from which this book emerged, and at which Wu, Zou, Zhang and Li Xinmin, another project participant, were all present. The additional five chapters, plus introduction, range from detailed close analyses of documentary case studies to attempts at broad critical synthesis. With the exception of Yomi Braester's exploration of film criticism, however, they largely follow theoretical frameworks similar to the studies of the Memory Project. Overall, then, the collection is particularly concerned with questions of ethics, power, collective and individual memory, performance, and the cultural politics of the image – issues that are pillars of traditional documentary studies, and which in recent years have become more central to the study of Chinese documentary.

The collection's first section is titled “Cultural context.” The introduction includes a brief review of the extant literature in English on independent documentary in China. Zhang Yingjin's chapter that follows argues that independent documentaries’ significance as documents derives from their “provocation of doubt and their contestation of power and knowledge” (p. 22). In consequence, the political value of these works lies in their performative interventions, particularly where these bring social conflict and repressed memory to the surface. Yomi Braester's chapter shifts the focus to film criticism. Through consideration of one event and its aftermath – the controversy over a panel held at the China Independent Film Festival in 2011 – Braester maps both recent debates in independent documentary over the ethics of director-subject relations, and the battle between Chinese practitioners and critics over who gets to “speak” for, and about, the field itself. Section two, “Rural reconfigurations,” consists of essays by Angie Chau and Paul Pickowicz. Both focus on the Memory Project. Chau contextualizes the project against the longer history of “root seeking” in Chinese cultural production, comparing and contrasting the films with experimental literature about the countryside written in the 1980s and 1990s. Pickowicz focuses on Zou Xueping's The Starving Village and Satiated Village, arguing that the films focus less on the present than on “the complicated postsocialist connections of the present to the past” (p. 74), in the process making clear how the legacy of the Mao era shapes society today.

Section three shifts the focus to embodied filmmaking. Tong Wang's chapter considers the Memory Project films as examples of essayistic filmmaking. Drawing on the work of Michael Renov, Laura Rascaroli and Timothy Corrigan, Wang argues that they represent attempts by younger directors to reconfigure their own subjectivity through the public retrieval of lost and buried memories. Laura Kissel considers Zhang Mengqi's Dancing at 47 KM and Wu Wenguang's Because of Hunger through the prism of David MacDougall's writing, demonstrating that the bodies of both filmmakers are critical to the affective register and documentary quality of both films. Finally, section four, titled “Documentary enactments,” moves us beyond the Memory Project. Alvin Wong and Wang Yiman's essays provide a Lacanian reading of masculinity in Hu Xinyu's The Man and Xu Tong's Wheat Harvest, and a consideration of ethics in Xu Tong's The Drifter's Trilogy, respectively. Wang Hongjian's chapter revisits the question of performativity in independent documentary from a number of perspectives and across a range of material. The collection concludes with the abovementioned appendix, and a select documentary filmography.

While not quite as comprehensive as its subtitle implies, Filming the Everyday is a useful addition to the literature on independent Chinese documentary. The chapters on the Memory Project – in particular, those in the book's third section – serve both to bolster existing work and position the films in relation to wider debates in documentary theory and practice. In their introduction, the editors state that “Independent documentarians and their work are not going away, no matter what the party-state does to discourage them…” (p. 15). Let us hope that this remains the case for the foreseeable future, China's new film law notwithstanding.