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."

The short film, The Farmer - directed by Anna Kroup, produced by Kaiyi Li and Xuedong Zhang, as well as supervised by Geoff Poister and Zixun Sun - features a farming family living in an isolated region of Inner Mongolia.

There’s a constant presence of wind throughout the entire film, which demonstrates the fleeting actions of his visitors. The farming family is operating a field, known as 'Happy Garden,' to encourage Chinese city tourists to join him in growing crops and raising sheep livestock during the weekends and Chinese holidays.

And just like the wind, the visitors arrive for a brief stay and vanish. But the farmer hopes his guests learn important lessons in life such as showing greater respect for agriculture workers, working hard and playing hard. The benefits of the 'Happy Garden' experience is that visitors can breathe fresh air, feel a closer kinship to nature, while children are allowed to play in the fields.

In recent years, more Chinese city residents have expressed a keen interest to flee the urban jungle to become farmers, but in many instances they have failed in such ventures, since a farming life was more challenging than they had anticipated.

But at 'Happy Garden' they can play farmer for a weekend and return back to the comforts of city life as they return home on a Sunday evening.

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

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