Yao Village, Youling Village, Liannan County, Guangdong, an old couple in the twilight
When you think of rural China, what is the first image that comes to mind? Is it the self-sufficiency of the small vegetable garden, or the warm kang head of the large bungalow, or the sunset of the smoke, the leisurely and peaceful? ...... Nowadays, all kinds of hot short videos on the theme of three rural areas have built a simple and soothing, poetic and idyllic pastoral life for everyone.
However, the "poetry and distance" in the lens is often just a slice of the picture of rural life, and after excessive packaging and beautification, the real Chinese countryside is actually difficult to show its original appearance.
As a young man who came out of the village and town, Zhao Yushun and his girlfriend made a decision, they want more people to see the real appearance of rural life under the filter. So the two quit their jobs in big cities, put on their cameras, and traveled to hundreds of villages across the country, focusing on serious issues such as farmers' pensions, empty nesters, left-behind children, and crop losses.
Under their lens, the landscape is no longer overly poetic, and the pastoral is not only pastoral songs; More than praise, the 760 million Chinese farmers need to be seen and understood.
01 Shooting without filters, focusing on real problems
Zhao Yushun's documentary shows a small town in western Guangdong, where a hunchbacked mother-in-law carries a coin purse and pushes a farm cart past the camera, and her destination is mostly the town's big fair. The fair has always been lively, but it is not difficult to find that the stalls are basically gray-haired, dark-faced old people, sometimes quickly choosing dishes, sometimes chatting with neighbors, but more often quietly watching the passing pedestrians and vehicles. The narration in the documentary says: "According to statistics, there are 120 million elderly people aged 60 and above living in rural areas on the mainland, and most of their children and grandchildren have left home in pursuit of a better life." As a result, these old people who 'keep their homes and businesses' are helplessly labeled as 'empty nests'..."
The basic people guarding the stalls are the old people in the village
The camera turned, to a certain town in Yangxi County, Guangdong, during the day, the streets were sparsely populated, and at night, they were even more exhausted. Only one or two of the rows of three- or four-storey houses on the street shimmer, except for the New Year festival, it is difficult for the township to be lively again. For many rural youth who are struggling in the city, their hometown can neither "let go" nor "go back".
In the summer of 2022, Zhao Yushun came to Sichuan to shoot, under his feet, the land was lumpy, cracked, corn stalks were yellow, making a crispy sound in the wind, small shops and large and small buckets were lined up, and 10 provinces and cities in the Yangtze River Basin were eagerly waiting for the arrival of a rain. An eldest sister in Xuyong County, Luzhou, looked at the camera in Zhao Yushun's hand and said disappointedly: "There is no big harvest for you this year." ”
The above scenes are all from the original short documentary released by the B station Up master "Meet the Truth Chronicle". The "Yuzhen Chronicle" account is jointly operated and maintained by Zhao Yushun and his girlfriend, and the rural documentaries in it are no longer than 20 minutes, and the topics of concern include empty nesters, rural hollowing, brain drain, drought and crop production reduction... Although there are many beautiful pictures such as green grass and blue sky, birds and insects chirping, the camera is zoomed in from afar, and the real focus is on the real problems faced by ordinary people.
A reporter from Beijing Youth Daily found that although it is also the theme of three rural areas, Zhao Yushun's works are essentially different from the tourism "planting grass" guides and videos of many marketing numbers. In terms of video production, he does not do the stacking and editing of ready-made materials on the Internet, does not add filters, does not apply special effects, and is not traffic-oriented, and does not need "old iron double-click like".
Zhao Yushun's shooting is very "casual"
Zhao Yushun's shooting is also more "casual", not writing scripts, not doing homework before traveling, and interview subjects are randomly selected at the end of the village. The content presented in the "Chronicle of Encounters" series of documentaries is what Zhao Yushun and his girlfriend saw along the way, and the views output are also their most real feelings at the moment.
In terms of theme setting, each short film shot by Zhao Yushun is explaining and discussing a rural reality problem, and the most grounded documentary pictures are accompanied by natural narration, supplemented by data support, so that these documentaries coexist with depth and temperature.
02 Resign with his girlfriend and go to the countryside to "generate electricity" for love
Zhao Yushun, 28, is a real village youth whose hometown is in a town in Shaoyang, Hunan Province. As a farmer's child, he was taught to study hard, "jump out of the farm", and take root in the city.
Later, he went to college and got a decent job in a big city. Before resigning to make a documentary, Zhao Yushun was also a media worker, and in his daily work, he found that villages and farmers were often in a state of aphasia. "Two passengers on the Beijing subway quarrel for 5 minutes on the hot search, and no one in the village may care if two villagers quarrel for a day." Zhao Yushun said.
And what made him burn out of the big city and eventually give up started with a citizen hotline. It was a dispute between a resident and a property over parking spaces, and after receiving the clue, he swept a shared bicycle on the side of the road and went straight to the scene, "I, a person who has no car and no house, is going to help people who have houses in Beijing solve the parking space problem." On the way back, he felt extremely absurd and poignant.
"It's not fair that the spotlight always seems to be for big cities and big names." Zhao Yushun said. The tide of the times has swept away the young people in the village and town, and also swept away the attention of the village and town, and he wants to do something against the tide.
Zhao Yushun wanted to do something against the current
The "Chronicle of Yuzhen" team currently only has Zhao Yushun and his girlfriend. Since July 2021, the two have resigned and come to live in Zhanjiang, which is also the hometown of Zhao Yushun's girlfriend. The reason for the separation is because doing self-media to make rural documentaries does not make money, and a person's fixed salary must be taken out to "feed" the account. In the meantime, Zhao Yushun will also take on a little private work to feed back his "grand wish".
But even so, the two went into debt. Soon after setting up the account, they also borrowed more than 100,000 yuan to buy a scooter, "which is a necessity, and many of the villages we go to are not accessible by public transportation." Zhao Yushun explained.
In addition to staying in the city and county, because there are a little more hotels there, most of their time is spent between villages. Open the satellite map and pick a random village near a certain county, whether it is in a ravine or a river valley, as long as the road is accessible, they will set it as the destination.
Once, when shooting in Guizhou, satellite maps showed that the village on the top of the mountain was still more than 60 kilometers away, and they thought it would only take an hour or two to get there, but they drove for four hours along the winding mountain road.
Regarding the documentary production process, Zhao Yushun is usually responsible for on-camera and narration writing, and his girlfriend is responsible for shooting and editing, and it takes at least 3 days to obtain materials for a documentary of about 15 minutes.
Zhao Yushun took pictures as he went
In the 1.0 stage of the "Chronicle of Yuzhen", they chose Guangdong, which is close to home. "There are 21 prefecture-level cities in Guangdong, and the Pearl River Delta region includes a total of 9 high-light cities, which should let people know what Guangdong is like outside the PRD." More than half a year later, they traveled to 12 non-Pearl River Delta cities in Guangdong, accumulating a lot of material and discovering an important rule: each place has its own characteristics, but the problems faced by people in these places are similar.
Therefore, in the 2.0 stage, they decided to go out of Guangdong, no longer taking a specific region as a topic selection clue, but around a phenomenon and problem, strung together the visiting materials throughout the north and south. Now, "Chronicle of Encounters" has reached the 3.0 stage, and Zhao Yushun has begun to get clues from the messages of fans in the background to choose the filming location.
In the past year and a half, Zhao Yushun and his girlfriend have traveled from south to north to at least 500 villages in nine provinces across the country, interviewing more than 100 farmers in detail alone. Zhao Yushun sighed that during the filming process, they received countless goodwill care in the communication with the villagers.
Deep in the Qinling Mountains in Shaanxi Province and in the ravines of Jieyang, Guangdong, in these remote villages that are almost isolated from the outside world, although Zhao Yushun and his girlfriend break in as outsiders, they can always be welcomed and moved. "These simple villagers know almost everything about us and are very kind."
Zhao Yushun remembers that on several occasions when talking to the old man in the field and on the street, the old man would suddenly take an egg or a package of biscuits from his pocket and hand it to him. In Chaoshan Province, villagers who have never known their lives will enthusiastically call them into the house to drink tea...
03 Village youth call for village narratives
Before dawn broke, Xiao Chen and his family were already in and out, busying themselves in and out, playing balloons, sticking couplets, laying out red carpets, and asking mages to make sacrifices to their ancestors. "White cut chicken, roast duck and pork platter, soy sauce ribs..." Today's menu is also written on a large red piece of paper. Xiao Chen was tying several bunches of reeds to the outdoor guest seats, "This is a plant from our hometown, and I hope that my wedding can have more connections with this land." Xiao Chen told the camera that these tall reeds were picked from the foot of the opposite mountain, where many of his relatives were buried, and he hoped that these deceased people could also participate in his wedding in some form.
Screenshot of "The Whole Village Prepares a Wedding for Me"
As dawn came, the village woke up in a morning mist, and at noon, it began to rain, and family and friends sat around several large tables under a vaulted canopy.
This is a clip from "The whole village prepares a wedding for me" released by "Yuzhen Chronicle", Zhao Yushun said that a very important reason why they chose to shoot a rural wedding is that it is to give voice to the young people in the village and town. "We have seen too many luxurious weddings in churches, seaside and even castles on short video platforms, and many times, it is a deliberate expression of urbanization, on the contrary, rural weddings are not in the spotlight, and sometimes they are even presented in a curious entertainment, playful and stigmatized way." Zhao Yushun said that he felt that weddings, as a very important moment in the lives of young people in villages and towns, should also have a simple and holy rural narrative.
Whether it is south or north, whether it is rice or wheat, everything in the village and town will always bring Zhao Yushun a sense of original solidity. The deeper he went into the countryside, the more convinced he became. "Wearing a suit and tie and carrying red wine is modern civilization, I used to think so, but now I feel that wearing slippers and sitting under a jujube tree with a bowl of rice is also civilization." Zhao Yushun said. Today, when urban narratives dominate, they are trying to bring rural narratives back to the public's eyes with their own efforts.
The "Chronicle of Encounters" is all about the real state of the countryside
Nowadays, idyllic video works with the themes of "food production" and "farm life" have frequently become popular, and these works have more or less added a layer of filter to real rural life, and Zhao Yushun also has his own views on this. "Nothing is better than nothing, but showing more unreal scenes of the countryside can mislead the public and create stereotypes." He said that landscapes and clouds are indeed aesthetically beautiful, but it is cruel to force this subjective feeling on local farmers and think that they live a life like a paradise.
"Since elementary school, textbooks have allowed us to praise the uncle farmer, but they have not taught us to really understand the farmer and understand the growth of corn, so the praise has become an empty slogan that the parties do not know what to say, in their self-thought romantic verses, the countryside is a beautiful scene of beautiful mountains and rivers, but for the peasants, the landscape has no poetry, the countryside has no pastoral songs, and farming is to survive." Zhao Yushun sighed.
Zhao Yushun hopes to let more people understand farmers through his lens
In October 2022, Zhao Yushun received a commemorative plaque with 100,000 fans on Station B. In November, they finally received their first ad. Zhao Yushun bluntly said that although they still can't rely solely on the "Yuzhen Chronicle" account to make a living, they still have to take some part-time jobs to subsidize creation, but everything seems to be developing in a good direction. In the 2022 year-end summary video, Zhao Yushun said that at present, he and his girlfriend have returned to their hometown to live for a long time, "Compared with before, the happiness is higher now than the eucalyptus tree in the field." ”
(All photos courtesy of interviewees)
Written by/Beijing Youth Daily reporter Wang Jingyi
Coordinator/Lin Yan Zhang Bin