Iowa City filmmaker humbled by Hong Kong protests

Kaitlyn Busbee didn't know if anyone would show up. It was just days before pro-democracy activists gathered on the streets of Hong Kong, calling for open elections outside the influence of the Communist Party in China — demonstrations that now have continued for the last month.

People were on edge. The Chinese Ministry of Public Security had already canceled planned workshops in creative writing, dance and composition led by Christopher Merrill, the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

As a last-ditch effort to salvage their cultural tour of diplomacy, the group devised a plan. They would hold a workshop in the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou and open it up to anyone who wanted to come.

Busbee, 25, was hired to film the tour for the writing program's website. She was raised in Clive, Iowa, by filmmaker parents Kimberly and John Busbee. She had backpacked Europe, studied in London and traveled across the U.S. filming a movie. She was not naive. But this trip revealed the lack of freedom of expression in China that she had known since putting together little films with her Valley High School friends in her parents' basement.

With cameras rolling, Busbee saw dozens of people file into the consulate — university students, independent artists, old men, people in wheelchairs, or with mental disabilities. In all, nearly 100 people showed up to express themselves in poetry, dance and music.

To be free.

"It was humbling," she said. "I was thinking, 'This is much bigger than me.'"

No way could the Iowa City filmmaker edit this into 15 minutes. This was a full documentary unfolding.

"It felt like we were doing everything on the sly," said Busbee after the official workshops were canceled the last week of September.

One night they went to a back alley, of sorts, to meet with writers, passing little open-door shops where women knitted or young men sold soda pop. When they arrived, they were greeted by eager artists who had filled the table with Starbucks coffee as a way to welcome the Americans.

"I just found such beauty in the human spirit," she said.

Not so with government officials, who said they canceled the workshops to protect the students.

"Why they were so threatened by a poet and a dancer and a composer, I don't know," said Merrill, who led the tour also to reach out to people in China with disabilities. "It's safe to say that China has a complicated relationship with the disabled … almost as if they are hiding them in shame. We wanted to show the disabled that they have as many rights as anyone else."

The group went to a school for disabled youth. A young blind woman led them on a tour of the school. She had practiced what she would say for two days.

Merrill's writer friend, Stephen Kuusisto, who is blind, led the group of students and asked them to write a poem of what they had learned together.

"A rose is the legend in my heart," Kuusisto wrote that day. "I know this now."

To Busbee, it meant so much that she already has tabbed it as the title of her forthcoming documentary, The Legend of My Heart.

Even with restrictions, with age and disabilities, she thought, each of us has an internal compass that guides us to what's in our hearts and to each other.

It's why she got into filmmaking in the first place, and why she thought a trip to China to exchange ideas on art was as important as any for business.

"Arts get to the essence of what makes us human and what we are supposed to do here," she said.

It wasn't to please her parents, Iowa filmmakers who launched the Wild Rose Film Festival, starting Thursday in Des Moines, a dozen years ago.

"She was born into the performing arts early on," Kimberly Busbee said. "But we never pushed her into it; in fact, the opposite. If you want to be in film, we told her, you better like ramen noodles.

"She's got a mind of her own, this kid. I love that."

Kaitlyn studied film at the University of Iowa and graduated in 2012 but resisted moving to Los Angeles or New York, where "it was going to be a hustle game," she said. Instead she took a job producing videos for the University of Iowa Hospitals.

In her spare time, she worked with friends on a buddy road-trip movie, shot in seven days and for $3,000. Among the actors is MacKenzie Meehan, who played the part of Jonah Hill's wife in The Wolf of Wall Street. The film, These Hopeless Savages, is about thirtysomethings trying to navigate their adult lives. It has appeared at 20 film festivals, including the prestigious Tribeca Institute's "30 Under 30" festival for emerging talent across the world.

Her film's place in Wild Rose in Des Moines was chosen by a jury — her parents said it had nothing to do with them.

Busbee was picked by Merrill to do the China project because of her work filming the stories of sick children and their families in her full-time job at the hospital.

"You hear some miraculous stories and that's a gift, hearing all the human experience, and trying to do justice to that gift," Busbee said.

It came in handy in China.

As people filed into the workshop, Busbee was shooting with a camera issued by the consulate. They had seized her camera and told her that all film would be reviewed and sent to her later for security reasons. The American restrictions, she thought, were almost as bad as the Chinese.

"That's where the rebel artist came in," she said. "I copied the files to my computer."

On those files is the story of Chinese people coming together to create, as dance instructor Michelle Pearson told them, "something that didn't exist in the world 10 minutes before. This dance would not be in the world if you were not here."

They started with one poem and an older man sitting on a bench — and it took off. They created a tale of the old man's younger self visiting him on that bench and reviewing his life, written, set to music and danced by the Chinese people.

Some were skilled, moving in concert with the disabled, creating a moment of understanding that didn't exist before, even as people gathered two hours away to demand freedom.

"It was important to realize that no matter the turmoil, here these moments of joy exist," Busbee said. "They told me that what they experienced was 'like freedom.'"