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, Eternal China - directed by Andreas Koufpoulos, produced by Cecilia, features a craftsman of wooden architecture and artwork who focuses on traditional Chinese designs.

Liu Xile, the crafstman, is employed at the Baoding Huizhou Architecture Museum and works as a man possessed trying to build a village with buildings and pathways designed with traditional Chinese art and customs. When completed, visitors can escape back into time when China's ancient imperial dynasties had ruled the kingdom.

In today’s China, a country that is marching forward on urbanization and modernization at a blazing pace, contemporary Chinese must adapt to a fast-changing society,so it seems fitting that more and more Chinese are expressing a deeper interest in learning more about China’s ancient history and customs.

By reflecting on history, they can appreciate the amazing scientific and hi-tech advancements that have occurred in recent decades. China’s rapid development has made more Chinese yearn for a return to what they believe is a more simplistic and conservative era.

But as we can see for ourselves, building an ancient Chinese village while using tools from that era demonstrates that life was not easy for the Chinese who were alive many centuries ago. The employers building the village are hard at work and they must carry on with their jobs or China’s illustrious past may soon become nothing more than a distant memory.

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

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