Back to Film Information
Chinese Independent Documentary--Village Documentary Project :
CIDFA029:
My Village in 2006 (Shao Yuzhen)
Directors: Shao Yuzhen
Length: 80min
Production Year: 2007
About the film and its director:
Ms. Shao Yuzhen is a 57-year-old farmer living in a village on the outskirts of Beijing. Her documentary filmmaking practice started in 2005, when she was selected to be one of the ten national participants of the China Villager Documentary Project, a project implemented by the Caochangdi Workstation. She was awarded a digital video camera and has been using it to document her life and lives of her fellow villagers ever since. During the production of her first documentary short entitled I Film My Village, Shao Yuzhen developed a personal approach to documentary filmmaking, with which she went on to shoot more than 50 hours of video footages during 2006 and 2007. This new film, which was edited by Shao herself with the footages she compiled in the last couple of years, vividly captures the life of an ordinary village woman as she juggles her family life, rural work, village social life on a daily basis. In a uniquely “Shao style,” the film also documents the villagers’ encounters with mass media professionals (who represent “the world beyond the village”) and interactions between the villagers and the “outsiders”.
Director’s Statement:
I have spent the entire 50-odd years of my life in my little village home, dividing my time between field work and piles of house chore. After a hard day’s work in the field, my husband would come home, rest and watch TV, while I would cook, do the laundry and get other housework done. Years went by while Life repeated itself day after day. There was little to be left for our next generations. Now that I am armed with a digital video camera, I can leave an account of my life and lives of my fellow villagers. This will be our legacy to be passed on to the next generations.
Director’s Bio:
Shao Yuzhen, female, born in 1950, has spent all her past years living and working in her home village of Shaziying, located in Beijing’s Shunyi District. Shao joined Caochangdi’s Villager Documentary Project in 2005 and completed a documentary short entitled I Film My Village. My Village in 2006 is Shao’s first feature-length documentary film.