Participatory mode: applicable to the Looking China project

As the world documentary evolved in a span of a little more than 100 years, aesthetic modes had gone through several stages of change, from Grierson pattern to direct cinema and cinéma vérité, and further to self-reflexive style, etc. These modes developed and prospered successively in history and coexist at present, and each mode corresponds to a different creation method. In the western academic circle of documentary, the classification theory proposed by Bill Nichols, an American historian and theorist on documentary, was widely discussed and accepted. He categorized modes of documentary creation into poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative ones.

Various theories exerted influences to varied extent in different eras in China. After the 1990s, typical films in the west, including Sherman’s March, Thin Blue Line, and Roger and Me, built traits of new documentary—first-person, self-reflection, reenactment, and collage, and shook the theory of direct cinema at its foundations. At the same time, however, the impact of direct cinema was so huge in China that many people tended to equal such mode to reality itself. Professor Zhang Tongdao once remarked that

“In the past few years, there crawled a group of sentence-making trainees of documentary in the enormous shadow of Odyssey of the Great Wall. They practiced endless tracking with swaying, low-lit scenes.”(Zhang, 2000, p71)

After the year of 2000, a great number of western documentaries were introduced into China, and new modes of documentary production enjoyed increasing popularity. Changes took place quietly in some Chinese documentaries. For example, large-scale historic documentary blockbusters, including The Forbidden City, Yuanmingyuan, New Silk Road and The Bund, laid unprecedented emphasis on reenactment, narrative strategies, and computerized special effects. To conclude, all modes mentioned above are currently applied by Chinese documentary filmmakers, and documentaries produced in different modes are greatly varied of their styles.

Certainly, the Looking China project welcomed all modes, but in my personal view, the participatory mode was the most recommended. It was because the directors should complete the overall process from project initiating to screening in only 17 days. They might find it hard to apply simple observation advocated by the direct cinema mode, and even feel impatient to wait those related events unfolded naturally, let alone to accumulate adequate dramatic changes. Their biggest concern was that nothing happened as time had gone by. Therefore, it was more effective to employ the participatory mode and catalyze events to unveil realities, as evidenced of most documentaries in the project of this year. For example, in The Winter Olympics Trumpeter, Ovie Antonio Obebe, a student from Nigeria, originally intended to observe the family quietly behind his camera. However, his interactive relationship with the family changed on the first day upon his arrival. En’en, the little trumpeter, was then practicing playing trumpet, and Antonio said that he could play drums. To his surprise, En’en rushed into his father’s room and took out an African drum. Very quickly, they began to improvise with good teamwork. Just at that moment, I saw all these with my eyes wide open, feeling that the boundary between the director and the subjects in direct cinema had been eliminated. Antonio treated the family as his old friends at his first meeting, and they shared experiences to each other in a delighted atmosphere. It soon reminded me of David Maysles and Albert Maysles, two masters of direct cinema, who stressed sober-minded, objective observation without getting involved into the life of the observed and let the audience judge all events. However, something changed the moment they stepped into the “Grey Garden”Footnote 1. The garden, overgrown with weeds, had seen no visiting men for a long time, but the interdependent mother-daughter relationship stuffed with grievance. When Little Edie, the daughter, presented before the camera, her performance, especially her dancing with an American national flag in her hand, was totally not a show to a “fly-on-the-wall”. Besides, “no views”, as typically stressed in direct cinemas, were but to keep those views invisible to the audience. Although in such films, the director pretended to be absent from the spot and the part of dialogs at the interview was cut off, the “field” generated by the person-to-person interplay can’t be cut off.

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In “Looking China: A Tour in Beijing”, several films can provide the examples of such “field” of emotional communications. A typical example goes to Lily Pan, a Myanmar girl. She set Professor Zheng Xuan, a sign language teacher at Faculty of Education, BNU, and a hearing-impaired person as well, as her subject. It was partly because her grandfather suffered from hearing loss, and, with deep love to him, she came into the life and work of the professor. When she visited China’s Disabled People Art Troupe with Zheng, she took her opportunity to exchange with Tai Lihua, a leading dancer known for her wonderful performance in Thousand-hand Kwan-yin and appreciate a poem of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) expressed by a hearing-impaired actor in sign language. It was her in-depth interaction with the hearing-impaired that made her film affectionate and touching. Another example goes to Nicola Mazzei, an Italian student in Beijing Film Academy who loved music and ran a band of his own. He was somehow depressed due to COVID-19, but he got immediately delighted one day after hearing a song with cheerful rhythm. He then contacted the singer of the song to set off his documentary shooting and probed into the spiritual world of contemporary Chinese young musicians. Now come to Lineo Kobeli, a doctor candidate on comparative education studies and a girl from the Kingdom of Lesotho who went deep into a bird-loving family. By taking part in outdoor birdwatching with the family, she tried to think over the parent-child relationship in nature education. Rather than observing in a calm and collected manner, she tended to take advantage of theories of comparative education and integrate what she observed into his studies. It was exactly as the words she told before the camera at an interview after the shooting set off. She said,

“Consciousness and being present are my keywords … In this world, we have different people, different cultures, and different nations. And being with this family taught me how to be conscious to these things and how to be present at the moment to know that I am with you, you come from a different place, but I can accept you because I know you.”

As to Raaz Ali, a young man from Bangladesh, a country known for its splendid embroidery works, he visited an artist on Beijing embroidery. During the visit, he shared photos of Bangladesh folk costumes with the artist sitting beside him, and he turned his filming into a kind of cultural exchange. When night fell, he played guitar and the artist sang songs, marking subtle feelings between them.

Judging from above, the participatory mode was particularly suitable for the project, as it stressed the director’s perspective as the perceiver. It further enhanced the transcultural aspect of the project and strengthened the communication carried out by the directors in their own countries.

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The first-person narration

Now back to The Trumpeter. In Antonio’s visit to the grandfather of En’en, En’en, his father and his grandfather played My Motherland and I, a song that expresses the ardent love of Chinese people to their motherland, by trumpets together. Soon, he was deeply touched by the story that how the trumpet of En’en was handed down, as it reminded him of his own family. Born in a family of music and hearing his mother’s singing on her back, he suffered from the death of his father and overcame the difficulties in his life with the help of music. Considering this, he was no longer a bystander, but a sharer of the stories of En’en. Later, he came before the camera more than usual and told his own stories, turning the third-person narration into a first-person one.

It was just the same to A Ray of Sunshine by Park Dong-hyun, a Korean director. He kept working behind the camera quietly on his first filming day, with few interactions with those before the camera. However, he had an empathy with volunteers in hard training for Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics as he recalled his experiences of being a volunteer for overseas students. In view of this, when a volunteer shed tears because of her working pressure, he appeared before the camera and kept her accompanied. After getting along with these volunteers for several days, he interacted with them more frequently, and the documentary, featured by his voice of kindness, presented the clue based on first-person narration.

Speaking of the person of documentary, the third person and the god’s point of view predominated Chinese documentary narration, given the huge impact brought by the Grierson’s pattern of narrated images and “imagery political comments” widely applied in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, the audience today tend to be fed up with the third-person, paternalistic narration that stands high above them. Instead, they prefer the first-person, amiable, personally-on-the-scene narration by either the director or the subjects. They also suggest that a documentary, even with a third-person narration, shall “talk” in a calm and friendly tone like one speaking unhurriedly in the ear of his friend, rather than in a god-like voice by a narrator in his or her solemn look.

Ross McElwee, Director of Sherman’s March, a typical first-person documentary, intended to shoot a film on both experiences and huge impact of General Sherman in the American Civil War. However, as he began his journey of filming, he was bored with the self-imposed task, and, in contrast, he turned to shoot a more individualized experience simultaneously unfolded by himself. In this way, he turned the work into his self-discovering journey. He came across girlfriends along his way and his idea of life faced a subtle change after the filming completed.

An increasing number of independent documentaries adopt the first-person narration. The directors turn their cameras exactly to themselves, and their families and friends to keep a record of intimate, estranged, or distressed relationship between each other. By doing so, they try to rethink or heal such relationship. For example, Minding the Gap, one of nominated documentaries in Oscar 2018, told stories with sad, lonely, confused moments in the growth of his friends as skateboarders of Liu Bing, an overseas Chinese born and grown in Chicago. Liu also put himself and his mother before the camera, deepened his understanding of the mother-child relationship, and eventually let go those unhappy bygones. In Four Springs, a nominated documentary of Golden Horse Awards 2018, Lu Qingyi, the director, focused on his parents, and left video records of trivial things of his family in the consecutive four Chinese New Year, along with their joys and sorrows. The documentary was released to the public in Chinese mainland in 2019, hitting a box office of 11.47 million CNY.

Even those mainstream documentaries tend to privatize their public spaces, as evidence of the shift from macro-narration to micro-narration, or simply from “listening to what the narrator says” to “listening to what the subject says”. A typical example goes to They Shall Not Grow Old, a Peter Jackson’s documentary featured by no narration nor expert comments. It elaborately wove a first-person narration of soldiers with selected audio tracks from nearly 600 h interview recordings of 200 British WWII veterans. In the oral history of those veterans, all details meshed perfectly and complemented each other. It was also in such history that they inquired their personal memories from the collective ones and penetrated those detailed facts. Similarly, instead of applying the narration of god’s point of view, Diana: In Her Own Words carefully edited nearly 50 h recordings of Diana’s talk from a secret interview. As the princess talked about her experiences before and after her marriage with Prince Charles, the documentary successively restored her depression and loneliness. (Yu 2021, p 40) Given that documentaries of this kind appear more frequently worldwide, they offer the audience with immersive film-watching experience and return the right to interpret the history to persons concerned.

The two UK documentaries above relied heavily on voices of the subjects, another kind of first-person narration. It was the same to Childhood in China, our co-production with Mr. Vikram ChannaFootnote 2 from Discovery Channel. To receive personalized feelings and refreshing ideas from children in the documentary work, we asked them to watch the rushes of different stages of their own lives in our edit suite. We also took down what they felt, thought, and commented about being a part of the work. All these contributed to a documentary full of children’s words and free of voiceover, apart from the contextual information delivered in subtitles in its beginning and end. It particularly provided the audience with a sense of kinship when broadcast on Discovery Channel at the very early of COVID-19 outbreak, when the negative public opinion dominated the international media. As a gentle wave in telling Chinese stories to the world, it went into the audience’s hearts easily. Besides, by filming the youngsters watching themselves on the screen, it embodied self-reflection that I will explain in the next part.

Self-reflection and new documentary approach

When a director appears before the camera in his or her films, he or she makes these films into reflexive ones. As the most central theme in the 20th-century art, reflection means to be self-reflected or mirrored topics, just like the left hand and the right hand were drawing each other, as shown in a classic painting of Escher, a Dutch painter. In another work of his, a hand lifted a crystal ball, on which the master of the hand was mirrored. Accordingly, shooting oneself with a camera means a way of reflection, and it was, for the first time, applied in documentaries by Dziga Vertov, a director of the Soviet Union. In The Man with a Movie Camera, he purposefully exposed his filming act to the audience and presented the editor’s montage effect. The film was thus regarded as the earliest self-reflexive film. Later, under his influence, Jean Rouch, a French director, made Chronicle of a Summer, a representative work of cinéma vérité and a key node with huge impact in the history of documentary. In Chronicle, cameras participated into events and stimulated the response of subjects to achieve reality. When Marceline Loridan was holding a street interview in Paris with the question “Do you feel a sense of happiness?”, answers, varied and distinctive, delineated all works of life in that city and unveiled many social problems.

Since the 1980s, documentaries with a mass of interview clips had prevailed. In the documentaries of Errol Morris and Michael Moore, they took a clear-cut stand against ambiguous acts taken in direct cinemas—They intervened directly the life of subjects to express their ideas. For example, in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore, a big-bodied man, stood at the gate of the US Congress and hurled questions to congressmen for those young men who lost their lives in the US aggression to Iraq. In Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock showed the long-term harms brought by McDonalds’ food based on experiments with his body. Besides, Louie Psihoyos turned The Cove, a documentary shot by the top-grade camera crew, into an adventurous genre film. It is not hard to see that documentaries don’t simply put a record to historic events, instead, they take part into them. Moreover, guided by post-modern aesthetic trends of thought, new documentaries also bring out collaged and mixed scenes, and bold experiments.

In “Looking China: A Tour in Beijing”2022, young directors managed to apply creative shooting methods, as they broke through the boundary of traditional documentaries, and brought into their fresh experiences or even experiments. For example, Hwang Yoo-seong, a Korean director, showed his strong interest into the torch displayed in the end of the opening ceremony of Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. Inspired by the Olympic rings and Five Elements (metal, wood, water, fire, earth), a classical Chinese philosophical view, he introduced environmentally friendly measures taken in the Games in five aspects, including earth, atmosphere, resources, water, and forests. Besides, he was good at making computer animation, which enabled him to provide fantastic images to explain technical principles. Another example goes to Kihumuro Jotham, who had ‘firsthand' experience of rocket launching before introducing the background information of the launch of Shenzhou-14. He observed rocket models in a museum of science and technology, felt gravity force in a fast-moving roller coaster in an amusement park, and experienced buoyancy when flying up in a wind tunnel. Benefited from all these experiences, he turned the grand mainstream narration into a humorous travel powered by imagination. As to Choi Yu-min, he made something different in his documentary on hutong, a spot that usually attracts foreign visitors, yet difficult to give a refreshing view before the camera. With three to-be-finished tasks, he pitched a tent into a hutong and lived in it. It was those elements of reality show he brought into the documentary that shifted the surface-deep experience into a thought-provoking collision with real native Beijing culture. It was believed that the audience might be emotionally aroused when they saw the young man dancing happily with neighboring old male dwellers. So were a journalist with the words after she attended the screening ceremony of the films that “it’s totally beyond what I may imagine that the mainstream themes could be presented in such a interesting way.” Indeed, seen from a global perspective, the glossary of documentary has been greatly expanded and its production methods are increasingly diversified. Therefore, every time we challenge its traditional way of recognition, we will push its boundary a little further.

Experiential documentaries to tell transcultural stories

By participating into activities and events of the subjects, foreign directors made Looking China documentaries into experiential ones, a burgeoning kind getting increasingly popular in the present world. Works of such kind usually mix the fly-on-the-wall mode and reality show, converting traveling into a process in which travelers constantly discover, interact with, and blend themselves into local people and their cultures. One may find successful cases in character-leading travels in BBC documentaries. In America, Stephen Fry, a British writer and a comedian, visited all 50 states of the US in his UK-style taxi to take a record of the country in the eye of a British. In another documentary named The Mekong River with Sue Perkins, the audience stepped into an upstream journey with Sue Perkins along the Mekong River, the most important international river in the southeastern Asia with a length of 4828 km. In the journey, she had an in-depth contact with inhabitants on riverbanks and exploration of great changes faced by local landscapes. Rendez-vous en Terre Inconnue (Meeting at Unknown Places), a French documentary series, hit a high audience rating of 29%. In each episode, a guest was invited to set off a journey without being informed of the destination ahead. The guest would then come to a remote exotic place and experienced local customs in an adventure. Notably, the camera crew once came to China and made an episode about villages of Miao ethnic group in Guizhou Province. In the episode, Clovis Cornillac, an actor, was together morning and night with the villagers for more than 10 days, during which he experienced the native culture and the life as a farmer. He felt reluctant to part with them before leaving, a touching part in the audience’s eyes. The documentary series had its first run in France 2 on April 12th, 2016, opening a window for the French audience to know more about the areas and cultures of original ecology in China.

Nowadays, personal experiences of such kind are increasingly applicable to transcultural documentaries. When facing huge cultural gaps, the host (or the participant) chooses to be personally on the scene and forms his or her opinions through real exchanges and interactions with others. He or she further communicates his or her feelings to the international audience to make them emotionally aroused, hoping to eradicate the long-lived biased views and stereotyped images. Here I would like to analyze the way to communicate Chinese stories through experiential documentaries based on three co-productions released in recent years.

In 2016, BBC broadcasted Chinese New Year 2016, a three-part documentary series co-produced by China Intercontinental Communication Center (CICC) and Lion Television, embracing China’s prospect and culture in a welcoming manner. Focusing on Chinese Spring Festival, several hosts traveled from Harbin to Hong Kong and felt the happiness of the new year with 1.3 billion Chinese people.(Yu 2016, p 50) Interestingly, at the beginning of each episode, the hosts invited the audience around the globe in the name of China, indicating that foreign hosts came to experience and introduce China to the world. Most of all, the traditional curiosity to the travel in Chinese Spring Festival had been transformed into experiences of all aspects of Chinese living styles. The audience were moved by the eagerness of backing home, warming reunions of family members, and migrant motorcyclists showing no fear to the remote distance ahead (Yu, 2016, p 55).

In 2019, CICC and National Geographic Channel (NGC) co-produced Homestay China, a documentary series focusing on China’s targeted poverty alleviation. In the series, three hosts, namely, Dennis Nieh, an overseas Chinese, Kimi Werner, a freediving champion, and Chris Bashinelli, a citizen of the world, reached three poverty-stricken areas to experience the life of local people after getting rid of poverty. In the past, mainstream themes like poverty alleviation were generally presented in grand narration. NGC, however, expressed such theme into a personal experience of living and working with local people. Deeply impressed by hospitality of local residents, these three hosts offered positive expression over China’s poverty alleviation policies. Such expression may be, to some extent, persuasive to the international audience and conducive to eradicating stereotyped images in their minds.

In the same year, The Day I Ran China, a documentary series co-produced by Discovery Channel and Mango TV, invited nearly 10 young men of different cultural backgrounds and jobs to a village. These young men were asked to observe and share their views of the environment, culture, and daily life of local villagers in fast-paced, highly competitive tasks. Like Homestay China, the series highlighted the in-depth contact and interaction between the participants and villagers, and their positive expression of poverty-alleviation measures adjusted to local conditions, which were helpful to striking the chord of the international audience. With its second season released in 2021, the series was praised by News Review and Comment, a key periodical issued by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, that “It offered a new mode for communicating the image of the oriental great power globally.” It was also rated as “a successive model produced in China and geared to the needs of global communication.”(The Information Office of Hu’nan Provincial Government, 2020, p68).

In these documentaries, China is arguably rising as a great power, and it reflects the superiority of China’s socialist system in China’s high-speed development, biological civilization, and targeted poverty alleviation. Moreover, Chinese people are vigorous, open-minded, and friendly. Chinese scholars or experts are capable to express confidently in fluent English, and even ordinary people may speak a few English words.

Documentaries of this kind were featured by a point of view of “foreigners”, but not traditionally of “others”. In the view of most western directors in earlier years, China in the past was a remote and unacquainted oriental country, or more precisely, an authoritative, impoverished, and mysterious country full of antique treasures. Even modern China was merely a densely populated, polluted area where made-in-China goods were sold globally. In the past two decades, however, the world had a better view of China as it embraced the globalization. As more foreigners reach and settle in China, they regard China as a complicated polyhedral—It owns a profound history and a splendid culture, scars left by wars and a period of suffering, and the most diversified delicacies and natural, geographical resources. It witnesses the high-speed development at the expense of environmental problems and the determination to take quick actions to build ecological civilization. It has not only made-in-China products, but also created-in-China ones. They further recognize that Chinese people are definitely not characterless and monotonous machines working along the Foxconn’s assembly line, but affectionate, creative individuals full of vitality. In a word, they feel a real China and obtain relatively objective and balanced opinions only after they have personal experiences in China. For example, shortly after the breakdown of Wuhan at the very early stage of COVID-19 outbreak, the international media was inundated with negative news about China. Takeuchi Ryo, a Japanese director living in Nanjing, however, communicated to the world his personal feeling from the scene in a first-person experiential documentary. The documentary showed the internal angle of view of a foreigner, not the view of “others” of a stranger, and such outside-to-inside view also allowed directors to expand Chinese symbols in their eyes.

In the past, one would find out typical Chinese symbols, including giant pandas, golden monkeys, the Great Wall, the Yangtze River, the Forbidden City, Tian’anmen, and hutong, in documentaries of Chinese themes by foreign directors. But now, these directors carry out in-depth view towards China with new symbols, like CITIC Tower (also known as “China Zun”), China railway high-speed (CRH) trains, Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, and Yunnan elephants. Here comes How China Works, a co-production by CICC and Discovery. It, for the first time, focused on the operation in the highest building of Shanghai and the largest radio telescope under construction in remote mountainous areas. In Can Video Games Change the World?, another CICC-Discovery co-production, the director narrated stories of China’s targeted poverty alleviation in cases like the most advanced computer game design and desertification control. It was noteworthy that the positive effect of computer games to the social life and diversified methods of desertification control were even unfamiliar to the Chinese audience. Consequently, these documentaries were not only popular in the foreign world but also appreciated in the domestic market. To make such co-production, both participants and production teams are required to carry out in-depth understanding of China in a fairly long time. Wang Yuanyuan, Director of Program Production Center, CICC remarked,

“The host shall not have a look at China or just watch from an external perspective. He or she is welcomed to think over as he or she approaches into China,” (The research panel of The Report on the Development of Chinese Documentaries, 2016)

It was the same to the Looking China Project 2022, where overseas students have had some knowledge about Chinese culture. In other words, instead of shouting “Wow!” to express their exclamation, they went deep into their favorite topics and stories. Setting the theme of “People, Society, Nature”, the project this year explored the relationship between human and society, between human and nature, and between human and themselves, which actually provided directors large space to carry out their creative ideas. Their documentaries covered a huge variety of topics including Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, space flight, poems presented in sign language, pop music, Beijing embroidery, life in hutong, and nature education. More importantly, they not only presented Chinese typical symbols, but also talked about big events, contemporary life, and people’s emotions.

On one hand, symbols are usually highly recognizable and thus vital to communicating China’s state image; On the other hand, however, fixed symbols will rigidify the way the international audience understand China. Therefore, documentaries in the project shall, in the first place, present China’s state image to the audience around the world with flagship-like symbols, and, at the same time, select new symbols. For example, In A Poem to Grandpa, the director provided the audience with worldly-renowned poems of the Tang Dynasty in sign language, offering them a good opportunity to feel the beauty of Chinese poetry in the world of hearing-impaired people. In Looking Peking Embroidery, the director introduced not only China silk and embroidery, but also Beijing embroidery.

Endowing individual stories with Universal significance

It deserves to be mentioned that directors in the Looking China project chose to expand their individual-based stories to China-based ones. For example, In The Winter Olympic Trumpeter, one may find out the inheritance between En’en, his father, and his grandfather, the family’s influence, and the bridging role that the music played behind the story of En’en, the little trumpeter. Inspired by “Together”, a newly added Olympic motto in Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, Antonio said in the end of his documentary that the Games brought athletes all over the world to Beijing for their shared future. A Ray of Sunshine told not only the story of Tianshu, a volunteer, but also stories of more than 380 BNU teachers and students as volunteers, and even those of volunteers around China. While in The Spring of Beijing and of the Earth, the little torch displayed in the end of the opening ceremony of the Games presented not only advanced techniques, but also China’s commitment to a greener, low-carbon world.

It was also a question to me how to tell stories of individuals when co-producing Childhood in China with Discovery Channel, because children featured in Post-00s, the domestic version, were quite individual. But the international audience had a huge number of high-quality programs to choose from and they won’t pay attention to stories of several Chinese children. In short, they want to watch stories of China. So, how could we endow such stories with universal significance? We decided to have an interview with these children, especially to know their views on China’s relations to the world. Given that these youngsters usually expressed their ideas boldly, brightly, and uniquely, we chose the topics like the US-China trade war and relations, the cultural difference between China and the west, and the global warming. We also covered sci-tech topics like 5G and C919, China’s homemade large planes. When I added these interview clips in my film, their stories were retold with a broader field of view and reshaped with a strong link to China and the world.

We would like also to break the biased view that young Chinese people were characterless, because the audience outside China might harbor doubts about the real “childhood” in China. In the stories of these youngsters, they each had a distinctive personality, an open mind, and confidence. In the eye of Vikram, a film producer of Discovery,

“Meanwhile, their lives were amazing mirrors that reflected the arrival of China as the new economic powerhouse at the turn of the century.” (Zhang, 2020)

Therefore, with the help of some news archives, we blended their personal storylines with that of China at this unique time after the year of 2000. For example, we held a free talk over issues like the view of Xi Jinping, President of China, on building the new type of major power relationship between China and the US during his official visit in the US in June 2013. Generally, all these efforts continued to evolve the film into brand-new and globalized directions.

Conclusion

As a fantastic process, documentary filming allows a director to have dialogs or interact with his or her subjects based on what he or she recalled, experienced, or emotionally expressed. The director will take away and leave behind something at the same time. Based on its 11 year running, the Looking China project explores a way to tell Chinese stories better. Although the project welcomed all creation modes and followed no set form, the participatory mode was particularly recommended as it stressed the director’s perspective. The mode also enhanced the transcultural aspect of the project and improved the communication to countries of those directors. In “Looking China: A Tour in Beijing” in 2022, the foreign students as directors participated into documentary production and interacted with their subjects, bringing not only the up-to-date tense to their stories, but also the audience into the stories. It was their participation and personal experience that further communicate their feelings to the international audience. They hoped that these documentary works would emotionally arouse the audience and weaken their long-lived biased views and stereotyped images of China.