Full coverage: ‘看中國’外國青年影像計劃專題

Editor’s forward: "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 2018, students from 35 countries were invited to participate in the "Looking China" project. They were stationed in 11 municipalities, provinces and autonomous region here in China. Every filmmaker has worked out a 10-minute short film about Chinese culture around the topic of "Ecology, Biology, Lifeology."

In the short film - Early Summer Web - directed by Michael Renjo and produced by Shmily Song -viewers capture a closer look at real country living by following the day in the life of a little girl named Zhixin Zhao, whose parents had sent her to live with her grandparents and uncle for summer vacation.

The young girl looks pretty wearing a fashionable child’s dress, while her grandparents can be seen unwashed wearing old clothes plastered in mud and dirt. She seems out of place in the farming village and when her grandfather brings her along to toil in the fields, she had got bitten by insects and faced difficulties in pulling the crops.

The sad and lonely tale demonstrates how people from cities may consider country life as peaceful, since they can escape the pollution, overcrowded streets and noisy atmosphere of the city, but for farmers working in the fields is not a walk in the park.

Apparently, the girl’s parents had already known the pitfalls of a farmer’s life and did not accompany her to the rural village as Zhixin Zhao must endure two months in the country. Let’s hope she survives and when returning back home to her parents to start another school year, she has learned to appreciate the special comforts of city life.

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