By CCTV.com Panview editor team
Editor’s foreword: "Looking China" International Youth Film Project is co-organized by the Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture (AICCC), Beijing Normal University and Huilin Foundation, which aims to showcase the contrasting simplicity and glamour, the antiquity and fashion of China through unique perspectives of young foreign film makers.
As of the year 2016, 101 students from 25 countries were invited to participate in the project. They were stationed in 13 municipality, provinces and autonomous regions here in China. Every filmmaker has worked out a 10-minute short film about Chinese culture around the topic of “ethnic minority”.
Love Song of Kangding was one of the 10 songs selected by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) to represent human kind in space, and it is a love song well-known to most Chinese. And in Kangding, it represents the lives and culture of the Zang people (Tibetans) there.
The film, Love Song of Kangding, directed by Eunice Tan, highlights the Chinese ethnic minority, Zang, who reside in the scenic mountain city of Kangding, southwest China’s Sichuan Province.
The Zang love to sing and dance to express feelings of joy. Some believe that people living in high altitudes often feel dizzy due to lack of oxygen, so they sing and dance for physical and mental well-being.
And in the olden days, when young people fell in love, they would sing to each other for courting before marriage. One elderly couple recounted their first meeting.
The man was rearing yaks in mountains there, while the woman was picking herbs in the same pastures. When the man spotted his wife-to-be, he began singing to her. The lady recalled that only after he had been singing all day around her for almost 10 days did she decide to sing back to him.
By singing back, that meant she accepted his courting, and soon after, the man was visiting her family’s home. They’ve been married for a number of decades with grandchildren living at their home.
Nevertheless, the young Zang people living in Kangding are not big fans of traditional folk songs. But, there’s one teenage band that tries to blend rock & roll with Zang folk tales to make the music more hip for the next generation to come.
(The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Panview or CCTV.com)
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