Editor's note:
The smoke and rain in March unveiled the warm spring, interpreting the day when the Chinese studio ushered in its tenth year of establishment. In the past ten years, with the care and support of all parties, this team has been moving forward, from planning news talk shows, to launching various short videos, to filming series of documentaries and documentary films. Looking ahead, the mountains are endless, so what's the matter. In special moments, you always have to leave some words. Today, we publish an article "A Little Reflection on International Communication Work" by Liu Yuan, Producer of the International Department of China Studio, which records our past journey.
△ Interpretation of Liu Yuan, producer of the international department of China Studio
Ten years has always been a special unit of time. Ten years can make a person from youth to maturity, and can also make a team from budding to growing. Every time I introduced the background of the studio before, I always said that we were a young team, and we had only been engaged in international communication for a short time and had limited experience. In the blink of an eye, the studio also ushered in its 10th anniversary.
In this decade full of changes, using the lens as the pen and the image as the ink, the studio's large and small works have also recorded the pulse of the times from my own perspective and told the story of China, and I am also fortunate to participate in one or two of them.
It has been two years since I joined the studio in April 2022. In the past two years, in addition to my own work in documentary filmmaking, I have also been fortunate to participate in the preparation of activities such as the Maritime Silk Road International Documentary Festival and the "New Era, New Image" Sino-foreign Joint Creation Program.
Before joining the studio, I also participated in many international cooperation projects in the field of Chinese and foreign film and television, but due to the huge difference in content themes and business cooperation models, many projects could not achieve the expected results. I can't help but wonder what should be done to disseminate Chinese stories internationally? Compared with many domestic projects, international co-production, which has high production and communication costs, may be thankless, but it is a road that has to be taken to tell Chinese stories well to the world.
Thanks to the studio's position and platform resources in the field of international communication, in practical work, on the one hand, through cooperation with think tanks, experts and scholars, it provides theoretical support for the construction of Chinese discourse and Chinese narrative system for international communication, and on the other hand, it broadens international communication channels through various cultural exchange activities and integrated media matrix, which also opens up new ideas for me.
The 2023 Maritime Silk Road International Documentary Festival is the first large-scale international event I have participated in since joining the studio. As the first international documentary event in China after the epidemic, the conference was attended by more than 400 documentary producers, directors and experts from more than 40 countries and regions, focusing on topics such as documentary image creation, Chinese storytelling, and cross-cultural cooperation.
△Poster of the Maritime Silk Road International Documentary Festival
Considering that the dissemination effect of Chinese stories in different countries and regions is very different, the acceptance of Chinese-themed film and television works in East and Southeast Asian countries is much higher than that of other regions because they belong to the same Confucian cultural circle as China and have similar language and cultural customs. In contrast, the mainstream content in Europe and the United States is relatively strong, and at the same time, due to the international public opinion situation and the cultural differences with Chinese and Chinese dialects, the acceptance of Chinese-themed film and television works is weak. This also requires us to develop different communication content and communication strategies for different regions and different countries. Therefore, the Maritime Silk Road International Documentary Conference has found a new way, mainly focusing on the cooperation and exchange of documentary film industry between China and countries along the Maritime Silk Road, especially developing countries, and using documentary images as a medium to build an international film and television culture and industrial cooperation and exchange platform for countries along the Maritime Silk Road.
At the conference, I was deeply impressed by the sharing of the chairman of the Tokyo Documentary Proposal Conference, Azuhiko Amagi. Amagi said that in 1980, when NHK and China Central Television (CCTV) jointly produced a documentary on the "Silk Road" on the theme of "Land Silk Road", he first came to China, when he went to Xinjiang with a CCTV film crew and was deeply impressed by the vast desert Gobi Desert in Xinjiang. In his view, China's rapid development and great changes in the past few decades have provided rich story material for Chinese documentaries. He believes that "both Japan and China can be very good documentary suppliers in the international market".
△ Chairman of the Tokyo Documentary Proposal Contest Azuhiko Amagi
Ashihiko Amagi shared that when the Tokyo Documentary Proposal Conference was first established in 2011, Japan had just been hit by the "March 11" earthquake, and overseas reports about the earthquake disaster were overwhelming, while Japan's own voice was very limited in comparison. This made the Japanese media at the time deeply aware of the lack of their country's international communication capabilities, so they turned their grief into motivation, and used their voices to tell the world how Japan had overcome this difficult moment. He believes that China, with its countless story materials, can also tell its own story to the world.
I benefited a lot from the exchanges with my documentary counterparts from all over the world, and also made me realize that the international dissemination of Chinese stories is not an easy task, which also puts forward higher requirements for our international communication work. Not only do we have to make great efforts to dig deeper into the value connotation and common emotional concerns of the content itself, but we also need to overcome various differences in culture, language, content and audience preferences, which requires a lot of patience and sincerity.
Taking the Sino-foreign co-production documentary about the central axis of Beijing as an example, the production of the documentary needs to focus on the deep-seated cultural connotation and historical value behind the central axis, and try to avoid ideological entanglement. The story of traditional Chinese culture is told with the central axis as the carrier, so that overseas audiences can realize the cultural values and concepts that have lasted for thousands of years behind the central axis.
At the same time, we must also know ourselves and our opponents, understand the international public opinion situation and the psychological cognition of overseas audiences, and find another way to tell China's story in a way that overseas audiences can accept and understand.
From the time I first joined the company, I took over the axis project, went through financing, determined the production team, documentary research and planning, shooting, and now the project entered post-production, this project can be said to have witnessed my journey from unfamiliar to familiar in the studio.
Now, before I know it, I've been in the studio for two years. In the past two years, I have gained a lot, and I would like to thank every leader, colleague and partner I met along the way for their support, and I wish Interpretation China Studio a happy 10th anniversary! Let us continue to work the track of international communication of Chinese stories, and do our part to tell Chinese stories and spread Chinese voices.