Editor’s note: TakePart is publishing a weekly series from friends, colleagues and family members living and traveling outside the United States. This week’s dispatch comes from Yu Gu, an MFA candidate at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts .

Twenty years have passed and nothing’s changed. These words of my father haunt me. On January 20th, 2009, a few days before Chinese New Year, I left Los Angeles and boarded a flight to Shanghai with an eventual destination of Chongqing. I was carrying two suitcases, a copy of Ha Jin’s A Free Life, an English version of my short script The Moth and a Chinese-English dictionary. The sense that I was setting out on a journey alone was very palpable. I was born in Chongqing and most of my family lives there, but I left when I was 7 and they stayed behind. Although I’d come back often visiting family and traveling, this time was different. My purpose was to make my short film, my MFA thesis at the University of Southern California. Because the story was based on my memories, part of the process was re-experiencing the textures of everyday life in Chongqing and bringing them into the film.

The setting was everything. The Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing contained for me a rebellious seed of imagination and wonder. My dad graduated from this school and stayed to teach. The school was an enclosed community where student and staff housing were in the same compound as the classrooms. Our first home as a family was a tiny apartment in a grey brick building we called #48. Ideas of shooting on a stage or another more spacious apartment were entertained, but in the end I decided on our original home.

In the years of 1988 and 1989, the fine arts institute was the center of a bohemian lifestyle. Drying oil canvases of nude figures and impressionistic landscapes were hung everywhere, unheard of a few years ago under the rule of Soviet social realism. Women wore colorful balloon skirts and shaggy-haired men wore acid wash jeans to the nightly dances. My parents just bought a color TV and a radio with cassette capabilities. The Cultural Revolution seemed like dark ages on the other side of a long tunnel.

Having just returned from the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, my dad began to teach installation and performance art to his students. Brimming with idealism, nationalism and hope, he wanted to contribute to a uniquely Chinese contemporary art movement. At 6 years-old I didn’t want to learn the piano or ballet, all I wanted to do was catch tadpoles, raise silkworms and feed my fascination with the world of visual art. This was the background and atmosphere I wanted to capture in my short film.

In the four months of living in Chongqing, there were times I felt like an alien from outer space. Leaving the cradle of Hollywood, a sense of reality set in. Unlike Beijing or Shanghai, Chongqing has no pre-existing infrastructure for filmmaking. There was no casting service, no film labs and no real equipment houses. My cinematographer Adam and I had to think of other alternatives fast. Then I realized that I wanted to make something closer to a documentary. Not in the sense of using a cinema verité camera style or purposeful jump cuts. Instead, I wanted to document the free spirit that still glimmered in this art school despite the perpetual tearing down of the old city, despite the onset of unbridled materialism, despite the government’s insidious indoctrination. I wanted to make a story that paid respect to my family history, one of survival of dreams despite repression. I imagined, too, that this story was not uncommon among people around the world. I discarded casting options from entertainment agencies and instead asked friends and acquaintances to act in my film.

The main character was played by a 7-year-old girl, daughter of a painter. Her father was played by a young painter and the mother was played by the wife of a filmmaker friend. Often traditional Confucian values of loyalty and fraternity are now used as currency in China, a cut-throat society based on relationships. But through working with my actors, talking and improvising, they really became my family and I came to understand why Chinese people call strangers brothers or sisters. Finally, the magic-realism of my story was enriched by the realism of lived experience.

The morning of Thursday, May 14th was a typical Chongqing cloudy, rainy morning. It was our second day of the shoot. I was showing my actress her “movie bedroom” and rehearsing when approximately 20 members of the so-called District Cultural Enforcement Team arrived and shut down our filming. They promptly separated us into two groups. One group remained at the apartment, the other was taken to a nearby classroom. We were interrogated separately. A recorded statement of our answers was written on paper and we were forced to thumbprint each document. They demanded to see the script. I showed them instead my storyboards. They searched our private belongings and found a copy of the rough script in Chinese. They promptly confiscated my storyboards and notebook by force.
They announced that they would also need to confiscate our Red One camera, a high definition camera that we rented for about $700 per day. After we protested that it wasn’t our property, they finally agreed to seal the camera in the bedroom of the apartment. I left with a friend to file a report at the Chongqing Film and Television bureau. My father assumed responsibilities as the producer of the film. The enforcement team leader pulled him aside and informed him that there was no hope of continuing the film here. The only way for us to get our camera back was if my cinematographer Adam and his assistant Raul changed their plane tickets and left China immediately.

That day, we disbanded the crew who was staying at the school hostel. That night, through personal avenues, we discovered that the incident was handled by the Chinese National Security Bureau (NSB). The cultural enforcement team was a front. Someone from within the school had reported to them that my film was about the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre.

The next day, my dad called the team leader to confirm that if Adam and Raul changed plane tickets, we would be able to access our camera. Instead, they informed us that both my dad and I would also need to change our tickets. The four of us would need to leave Chongqing that night. We protested that we needed time to say goodbye to our family. My grandma was in the hospital just after surgery. But they didn’t relent and we were forced to comply. They demanded my dad appear at their offices in Chongqing to sign some sort of agreement.

Upon his arrival, they presented a document written in my dad’s tone of voice stating that we were ignorant about the laws of the Chinese government, but after their education we became knowledgeable. They also added a statement that we both agreed to discontinue the making of this film in China and would never attempt to make it again, saying if we do, we would be punished by Chinese law. My dad was forced to sign and thumbprint this statement. We changed our tickets and flew to Beijing that evening.

Twenty years have passed and nothing’s changed. On my way to the airport, we drove past several bridges. Chongqing is the meeting place of the Yangzi and the Jialing Rivers and has over a dozen bridges. I gazed at the grey sky, the grey highrises sitting on mountainous banks and the muddy waters of the Yangzi. I had once thought this was so beautiful, so intimate–my hometown. But at that moment I just wanted to turn away, powerless and disgusted. What right did they have to change my emotions? What right did they have to reach in and take my love away from me? I remembered my dad telling me about 1989 when he flew out of Shanghai for Vancouver, Canada. He had looked down and seen the Yangzi river flowing into the Pacific ocean. Tears had welled up because he didn’t know when he would be able to come back. In my script, the story ends with the little girl showing her dad a fantastical moth born from a silk cocoon, the same one as in her drawings. He tells her to protect it always. Strange how a script can affect reality. Even though they took away my freedom to make the film, I can’t let them take my creative spirit. I have to protect it, feed it, because as a filmmaker, my art is my seed for change.