Promotional material for Our Dreams Our Homeland Photo: Courtesy of Qiao Yan
Chinese director Qiao Yan's documentary film
Our Dreams Our Homeland is set to debut in Chinese mainland cinemas in November. The production marks one of the very few Chinese documentaries in 2023 to hit the silver screen especially in light of the popularity of the motion-picture genre in cinemas and on TV.
The film is a milestone for Qiao's team and his production partner - the China Intercontinental Communication Center (CICC).
Yet, the director is most excited by the documentary's premise of capturing the dreams of ordinary people through film, such as a hot pot business owner and a wrangler from the Daur ethnic group.
Qiao describes the documentary subject's lives as art in and of themselves.
"It's a testament to how Chinese people work toward fulfilling their dreams step by step," Jing Shuiqing, the editor-in-chief of CICC, told the Global Times.
Real storiesIncluding the Xi Jire, the wrangler whose dream is to win a horse-riding match at the Mongolian Naadam Fair,
Our Dreams Our Homeland is a tapestry of 10 people's stories.
They include a beekeeping family's journey to provide their daughter with better education through apiculture; a hot pot business couple's dilemma in choosing between preserving "food tradition" and considering "lucrative expansion;" an astronomy enthusiast's passionate search for pulsars, and a young woman on her space career journey as a rookie handling rocket fuel measurements.
Unlike the traditional information-oriented documentary format, Qiao fragmented each storyline, creating a multi-storyline collage and montage of different day-to-day life experiences.
"Winter, spring, summer and fall," is the narrative logic hidden behind such seemingly disorder narratives, Qiao told the Global Times.
Qiao Yan Photo: Courtesy of Qiao Yan
In "winter," the director presents the subjects' dilemmas and difficulties. Taking the hot pot business couple, the Liao family, as an example, the thriving business of the couple's eatery in Chongqing Municipality creates a dilemma in which Liao, the husband, prefers to maintain the business's small size, while his wife favors a commercial expansion with an aim to maximize profit.
So the documentary film unfolds, with the common threads like life's difficulties weaving seemingly different lives and stories into one cohesive storyline. In so doing, the experiences of an animal wrangler and an aspiring space industry worker are more similar than they appear.
Just as the arrival of spring brings with it new hopes, so too do the documentary's subjects' lives appear to improve, and as fall rolls in, the section of harvest, the beekeeping family has raised enough money to cover their daughter's postgraduate studies, while Pan Zhichen, the scientist, has managed to find 500 pulsars by using the 500-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), the world's largest single-dish radio telescope.
"Using a multidimensional approach, the film broadens the narrative scope of the Chinese Dream from the perspective of ordinary people, paying tribute to ordinary and great participants of the era," Jing said.
Wang Shilu, the CICC documentary producer, told the Global Times that some protagonists' dilemmas, such as sacrificing their nuclear families' happiness for the benefit of the greater society, are a "common spirit that can be seen in many Chinese people's stories."
"Even though we may not live the life of a village teacher, we still have an understanding of having to sacrifice one's dreams to care for one's family," the producer said in reference to a village school teacher's story in the documentary.
The documentary crew work on the filming site. Photo: Courtesy of Qiao Yan
'Fire sparks toward the star' Qiao prefers to use the term "growing" to describe
Our Dreams Our Homeland.
Choosing only 10 stories from selection of more than 80 people potential subjects, the latest project echoes Qiao's previous documentary work,
The Most Beautiful China (2016), for which he had already revisited some of the subjects, choosing to expand their stories in the 2023 documentary.
The film marks a new attempt at marrying the concepts of art house filmography and a documentarian approach.
Qiao told the Global Times that such an "artful documentary" is a result of not only "unorthodox editing and filming" techniques, but also a new narrative model designed to guide viewers to focus more on the "coffee maker."
"Take coffee making as an example. Standard documentary making would explain issues such as where the beans come from or how the water temperatures have been controlled. But, we tried to focus on the coffee maker's story; she is the one who makes the whole repertoire meaningful," Qiao remarked.
The subject-centric Chinese narrative design has gained international recognition including from documentary powerhouse countries in Europe.
Prior to its Chinese debut, the CICC, the Chinese platform experienced in promoting Chinese documentaries overseas, showcased
Our Dreams Our Homeland in France and on Luxe.tv, a global TV broadcasting network, in January 2023.
In August, the documentary was screened as the opening piece at the China Documentary Festival, the country's first documentary-focused cultural event aimed at promoting young directors' new projects as well as promoting Chinese productions overseas.
Qiao told the Global Times that "Fire sparks toward the star" was another good title for
Our Dreams Our Homeland since it was not only poetic but also vivid in depicting a passionate spirit when one is dedicates to his or her dreams.
