China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Director follows dad’s lead to Hidden Land
A young film student follows in the footsteps of her intrepid late father to shoot her first documentary about a trip to a glacier in far-flung Tibet, Xu Fan reports.
When Rao Zijun was recruited to direct the documentary Hidden Land in Northern Tibet, she was still a fourth-grade student majoring in movie and television editing at Beijing’s Central Academy of Drama.
Alongside the other 47 crew members, Rao, who was then just 21 years old, trekked nearly 3,500 kilometers deep into the no man’s land of Tibet autonomous region’s Qiangtang, China’s largest nature reserve, in December 2016. With its lakes, deserts and glaciers, the area is a haven for some rare species, such as the Tibetan antelope, the wild yak and the Tibetan brown bear.
The 90-minute documentary, which is centered on the Purog Kangri Glacier, located around 560 kilometers from Nagchu town in the Tibet autonomous region, will open across Chinese mainland theaters on Aug 31, and will be released in selected European cinemas in late September.
Covering an area of over 400 square kilometers, Purog Kangri is the third largest glacier in the world.
Unlike most naturethemed documentaries featuring natural scenery and wildlife, Hidden Land in Northern Tibet is more of a soul-searching exploration about the people who shot the film.
Rao had a personal impetus behind this challenging project, which also marked her first foray into these little-know highlands with an average elevation of 5,000 meters above sea level.
When she was five years old, her father Rao Jianfeng became fascinated with climbing, and he went on to successfully scale 10 of the world’s 14 highest peaks around 8,000 meters high.
But the accomplished climber, who had by this time become a renowned figure in Chinese adventure circles, was suddenly shot dead by a group of terrorists in Pakididn’t stan on June 22, 2013.
At age of 49, Rao Jianfeng was then at a high-altitude mountaineering base camp in Gilgit–Baltistan, the northernmost administrative territory of Pakistan, and was planning to climb Nanga Parbat — the world’s ninth highest mountain at 8,126 meters above sea level.
“I heard the news and couldn’t believe it. I kept reading posts on Sina Weibo (the Chinese micro blog) until I could confirm it was true” recalls Rao Zijun during an interview with China Daily.
The young woman believed her trip to Purog Kangri would be a good way to understand her father’s enthusiasm for mountaineering as well as a way to come to terms with her grief.
Besides, she had once discussed with her father about shooting a documentary about his climbing adventures when he was still alive.
And for Cai Yu, the producer and scriptwriter behind the documentary, Purog Kangri helps him to ease his nostalgic yearning for his disappearing hometown: a remote, sparsely populated village in Southwest China’s Guizhou province.
To some extent, the two places share geographical similarities in Cai’s view, whose village often suffers from heavy frog and strong winds. Amid China’s nationwide urbanization campaign, the village — once reliant on the support of the local mines — has seen most of its residents migrate to areas closer to the big cities.
Once a high-ranking official with the Hainan province-based company ZOSE Group, Cai quit his job to travel in Tibet and Qinghai in 2012.
“Qiangtang is one of the oldest areas in Tibet. It was formed millions of years ago and was once dotted by green landscapes and rivers. Relics dating back to the Stone Age were discovered there, demonstrating that it was once a cradle of humankind,” Cai tells reporters at a premiere in Beijing on Tuesday.
When he returned to Hainan in 2015 and was appointed as the head of a film production subsidiary of ZOSE, he decided to shoot a documentary about Qiangtang, which has rarely been featured on the big screen.
After spending a lot of time on permission to film there, in November, 2016 he led a crew of 48, who drove there in 16 vehicles.
But the project turned out to be much more difficult than he had expected.
On the first day after departing Lhasa for Nagchu town, the closest inhabited area to Qiangtang, he received a call from his sister, who said their mother had been diagnosed with cancer and would need an operation. Unwilling to jeopardize the project and let down his colleagues, Cai tell anyone about it.
En route toward their destination, the highest peak in Purog Kangri, the majority of the crew suffered from altitude sickness. Chen Guiwen, the 51-year-old photographer who has wished to explore deep into the unmanned area for years, failed to realize his dream as he was diagnosed with acute lung edema on the first day.
Besides, wild animals had also become a potential threat. A giant wild yak attacked one of the vehicles and tried to overturn it. Luckily, the skillful driver avoided the hostile beast.
With nearly a third of the crew quitting due to health problems midway to their destination, the remainder finally arrived at their destination — the heartlands of Purog Kangri formed by glaciers millions of years ago.
“Time stops here. The secrets of the history of the Earth were all laid out in front of me,” says Rao Zijun, who put on her late father’s red down jacket to climb the peak.
But she had to stop at 6,000 meters as she was suffering from serious breathing problems in the freezing, windy conditions, where temperatures drop to as low as minus 40 C.
Rao knew the summit of Purog Kangri was more than 6,800 meters above sea level after researching the area extensively before setting out on the long-distance journey. Yet the rest of the crew were forced to stop at 6,200 meters due to the harsh conditions.
But the young filmmaker still feels grateful about being able to direct her maiden feature in an area that only a few people have ever set foot in.
“I’m the first and only student in my university class who has shot a feature-length film. I feel very lucky and hope to shoot more works about Qiangtang. It’s so vast and still has a lot of areas that remain to be explored,” adds Rao.