First time filmmaker David Harris goes inside the Public Kingdom for Teens. In an industry clouded with pretension and delusions of grandeur, David Harris is a breath of fresh air. The New Zealand-born director, who has been honing his craft for only a few years, says he learned everything he knows about film making through online tutorials and hands on experience, but already he boasts a healthy resume of projects including editing the forthcoming Edward Berger shadow puppet documentary to gophering on the DreamWorks film “The Kite Runner” to directing one of the best rock documentaries to hit China in a long time, “PK14: A Tour of the Public Kingdom."

"I had just bought a camera and wanted to take a film project from start to end, basically as a learning exercise,” explains the director from his comfortable hutong home in Nanluoguxiang in Beijing. “I heard that PK14 was going on a month long tour, thought that sounded interesting and so I asked if I could join them. Since they were doing such a big tour on such a small scale, I'm sure I was welcomed as at least an extra pair of hands to help carry the luggage.”

Yang Haisong, PK14’s charismatic front man, remembers it somewhat differently. "When Dave told us he wanted to be a director, nobody took it seriously,” he says. “He had never even touched a camera before, not to mention making a movie!"

The documentary follows the band through a whirlwind month of performances in 14 cities across China, and is a fascinating must-see for rock fans and anyone who's ever traveled through this upside down, wonderful country we call home. Highlights include a 30 hour traffic jam, a full on bar brawl, hilarious revelations about China's longest tunnel, and moments of complete exhaustion. The film portrays a warmer, friendlier side of the band—one not often seen on stage.

"It took about three to four months [to complete] an edit which plays similar to the version that's out now, and then a bit longer mixing the sound recordings," Harris says of the long process putting it all together. "I took more than 30 hours of footage, many of which were filled with unwittingly recorded rustling noises from the inside of some bus or bag while the lens cap was on and I had no idea the camera was rolling. In the editing process, I had no preconceived notions of what I wanted to do before we had begun filming, so in the end I just tried to follow a chronological order. Luckily, a guy we met in Chengdu had managed to get a great recording of the show the band played there, and so we were able to keep going back to that. Because we ourselves didn't have a great way of recording sound, a lot of it was just trying to marry the sounds with the images projected onto the screen."

In the end, the work pays homage to the trials and tribulations of touring in China. There is no moment where the film seems forced and the concert footage has the added bonus of being subtitled with song lyrics. "The making of the documentary had a finite time on it,” Harris concludes, “it was always going to be exactly what it was."

by Jenn Wong