China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Trying to feel at home
TV documentary highlights issues people face when relocating to new communities despite the greater convenience on offer, Wang Ru reports.
Yang Duoyan faced a dilemma. He had changed residence but more than that he had changed lifestyle. He no longer lived in the mountains but had moved to a new community in the city, where he had easy access to medical care and his son enjoyed better education. In any way, his life should have been much better than the old days. But despite the greater convenience, he missed the past.
He divorced not long after his son was born, and had to support a three-person household with his father and young son by himself. He needed money to cure his father’s illness but couldn’t find a proper job in the city due to his own sight problems following an eye disease. What’s worse, he received complaints of his son’s behavior at school.
The story is told in the documentary film Happy Community, which was released on April 2. It is a sequel to Beyond
the Mountains. The latter records the lives of people from Daqi village, Wuchuan Gelao and Miao autonomous county, Guizhou province, moving from deep in the mountain at the request of the government to a new community.
As part of China’s poverty alleviation efforts, Guizhou relocated 1.92 million people from inhospitable places to resettlement areas during the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20), according to the Poverty Alleviation and Development Office of Guizhou province.
“We want to show, when people move off the mountains, what changes they encounter in the new environment in the city, and how they deal with them,” says Meng Xiao, executive director of the film.
The film mainly tells stories of Qin Meng and Yang’s family. Qin loves art and the change of environment gave him more opportunities to realize his dreams. Middle-aged Yang moved with his father and son, and the film shows how the three generations faced their new life.
“When we say poverty alleviation, we usually focus on a group of people. But the influences on each individual are different. We want to see how the old father, middle-aged Yang and the young son dealt with the changes respectively, and offer abundant angles to the audience to view the whole process,” says Meng.
According to Jiao Bo, general director of the film, Happy Community was more difficult to make than Beyond the Mountains, since the latter has a general storyline about the event of people moving. But the new production focuses more on people’s internal struggles, which made shooting the documentary difficult.
“We didn’t have a general storyline to tell this story, and people can meet various problems living in a new community. So we tried to choose some symbolic figures. Yang’s father symbolizes elderly people, Yang symbolizes the middle-aged, Yang’s son symbolizes children, and Qin symbolizes those young people who are not satisfied with their life,” says Meng.
“I’m really impressed by people’s struggles. Although government has offered many favorable policies to help people get used to their life in the new environment, such efforts cannot solve problems met by every individual. For example, Yang has difficulty finding a job in the city, so he always wanted to return to his former life in the mountain, sometimes he even took his son to visit his former residence recalling the past,” says Meng.
“Local people view the mountain as their root, so when they leave the root they feel like giving up something they are born with. But they know the city can provide their children with better education, so they still decide to move. It shows both people’s emotions for their hometown and emphasis on children’s cultivation,” he adds.
Meng also considered the necessity of the government urging people to move when he saw their struggles, but his confusion disappeared when he visited Yang’s former residence in the deep mountain. “We hiked in the mountain for three hours from the town to get there. It was very poor and without any facilities for daily life. They used to spend a whole day going to the town for doctors, which was really inconvenient. But now they only need to go downstairs and can buy medicine.
“If they didn’t move, then their offspring would live in the same way. So the policy really brought Yang’s family a big change, which may influence the future of the family. Yang didn’t know what he would encounter when he moved, but good or bad, he had to go with it. It was a very important decision,” says Meng.
According to Jiao, this has been his group’s ninth project about the country’s poverty alleviation efforts.
“We have made so many works about farmers, and our way of shooting is settling down in the countryside. When farmers plant crops, we plant stories. When farmers harvest, we also make our work,” says Jiao.
Critic Yang Lang highlights Jiao’s efforts recording farm life. “Jiao’s group has been recording stories of farmers in the past three decades. Their works tell us that the changes in agriculture, countryside and farming are systematic, and they really matter to our future generations.”