Handsome Furs - Serve the People

What this video is

Released in December 2011, 'Serve the People' emerges from Handsome Furs' deep engagement with Chinese underground culture, documented through extensive touring in Asia. The album Sound Kapital, released June 28, 2011, was written entirely on keyboards and drew from Eastern European industrial and electronic music of the 1980s, while its lyrical content confronted authoritarian governance and economic inequality.…

Why it matters

Represents a key artifact of early-2010s Canadian indie electronic music's internationalist turn, combining Montreal post-punk sensibility with Beijing documentary filmmaking. The track's synth-driven urgency and politically charged lyricism positioned Handsome Furs as rare Western voices engaging…

The director

Han Xia is a Beijing-based filmmaker who was a film student at a local university when he met Handsome Furs during their 2009 Beijing tour. His direction of 'Serve the People' (2011) represents one of his earliest known credited works, shot in Beijing with a…