Full coverage: ‘看中國’外國青年影像計劃專題

By CCTV.com Panview

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. The program focuses on the young participants’ personal experiences of Chinese culture and encourages them to discover and tell Chinese stories from their own perspectives.

As of the year 2017, students from all over the world were invited to participate in the project. They were stationed in 12 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 "Craftsmanship·Inheritance·Innovation.”

In the 1960s, a canal was built across the Taihang mountains to irrigate the dying fields of Lin County in China, which is claimed to be 1500 km long. 100,000 people worked for nearly a decade to build it under poor conditions, only using manual tools. Some have died in the process, but the project is considered an amazing success story.

The movie "Canal", directed by Klil Leon and produced by Li Peiyu and Zhu Ge, brings some former canal construction workers to the spotlight. Lu Leiyun is 63 years old, he is a farmer and likes to play Chinese allegro. He has another job, acting as a Hammer-smith in a show performed in the Red Flag Canal scenic spot, which is dedicated to promote the canal's history.

Lu Leiyun said the canal is really helpful, the barren land became fertile, life is better now, since there is enough food.

The movie has a very profound and unique end. Lu Leiyun sits and smokes quietly with the village depicted in the background. As a man who was ordered to build a canal when he was just 23, and lived to see the changes of the land, there must be a lot more to tell than that viewers could see in a 10 minutes movie.

The movie shows many beautiful scenes of the village, mountains, streams, farmland. In general, this is a very good short movie to watch.

(The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Panview or CCTV.com. )

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