WHY THE TITLE?
All Static & Noise — translated in Uyghur غەيرىي ئاۋاز ۋە شاۋقۇن and Mandarin Chinese 杂音和噪音 — found its inspiration from a speech by Communist Party officials at Xinjiang University, brought to our attention by Anthropologist Darren Byler. In 2017, party officials gathered thousands of students and faculty in the university gymnasium to “explain” their version of the “Global War on Terror.” In this dramatic show of inflamed rhetoric, they painted Uyghur and other ethnic minorities in the Uyghur Region as “terrorists,” guilty of “separatism.” In order to address the “dangerous” threat, the Party Secretary, referring to Uyghur and other ethnic minorities, declared that “all static (杂音) and noise (噪音) would need to be eliminated.”
“Anyone who demonstrated the slightest resonance with unapproved Islamic ideologies was to be purified through a process of “reverse osmosis” (反渗透). He [the Party Secretary] said the goal was to create an atmosphere in which Uyghur Islamic “extremists” scurried across the street like rats while the public surrounded them screaming their disapproval and beating them in righteous anger.”
This reference to extremists as "rats crossing the street, while the public yelled and beat them “老鼠过街、人人喊打” was introduced by Xi Jinping at the beginning of the "Strike Hard" campaign in 2014.
When the Party Secretary used these terms to describe Uyghur and other ethnic minorities, it seems his intention was to vilify them with the hope of inspiring the masses to behave cruelly against them on the Party’s behalf. The film’s intention is to reappropriate this language, to make louder the voices of resistance and inspire the masses to challenge the hate that sits behind this inflamed speech.
Note that in English, the term “static” can have two meanings. The film’s title refers to the crackling sounds you might hear on a radio or television caused by electricity in the air, not stagnancy.
Archived source from Xinjiang University
Darren Byler’s inspired reporting