China Villagers Documentary Project

This video is a collection of ten short documentary films, each of ten minutes in length. They are ten funny films made by ten amateur villager filmmakers (age ranging from 24 to 59) selected from around China who are eager to discover their home villages through the DV lens and to tell stories and be heard, for the first time in their lives. It is the first time that Chinese villagers took up a DV camera to shoot a documentary of their own on the changing rural public lives and the changing countryside dynamics in their home villages within the developing democratic system known as “village self-governance.” For the first time public and political lives of Chinese villages are captured through the lens of the people who belong there. Villages can never be so real if seen by an outsider.