When Muyi recommended “Down from the Mountains” a documentary short film (24 mins) on her Facebook page earlier this year, I immediately clicked and watched. (Muyi Xiao is Director of Visuals, China File, Asia Society. She is also “The Girl with a Camera”, an award-winning photographer, multimedia storyteller whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for our podcast in Season 1 “One in a Billion.”)
The film opens with a breathtaking bird’s eye view of the towering trees and patchy mountains standing still in Sichuan Province, China. A slow grinding sound breaks the silence.
A young skinny boy, in a squatting position and holding a hoe heavier than his arm, is scratching dirt near a puddle. He looks bored, his gaze blank.
A young girl comes out of a stone house perched on the mountainside, staring at him without saying anything. She turns around running back to the house. The boy knows it’s time. Time to quit idle play, time to help his big sister with housework. You get a sense of their life as left-behind children simply by watching how they laze, and how they get to work even as no words are spoken.
They are big sister and younger brother.
Next, the big sister is seen washing her hair by bending her head into a plastic bowl of water. Her name is Wang Ying. The younger brother is stoking the fire. His name is Wang Jie. Their sister – Wang Bing, twelve years old, a middle child, is our story narrator. Bracingly honest, Bing describes her big sister as brave, her younger brother as naughty. And herself? “I am a very good student.”
You see her writing and reading, believing that she can achieve her dream if she studies hard. It’s refreshing to hear and heartbreaking to watch at the same time. They have to take care of themselves and lean on their grandparents for surrogate parenting while their parents hustle for work in southern China, hundreds of miles away from their mountain home.
You soon hear more about their story through the vibrant voice of the mother. Bone thin but headstrong, she speaks movingly about her tough life with her husband, trying to blend in as migrant workers, as Yi ethnic minority who can’t read Chinese or speak Cantonese, (local dialect), and as illiterate, but semi-skilled workers competing for jobs in a bustling industrial town.
Without giving away the whole film, I urge you to watch and feel one family’s backbreaking efforts to stay together even as poverty and livelihood threaten to tear them apart.
I come away with a deeper understanding of the incredible challenges confronting the Yi ethnic minority. China may have lifted hundreds of millions of its citizens out of poverty over the past few decades, yet doing the same for the Yis has been enormously daunting because of their scattered dwellings in remote and inaccessible mountainous regions.
But this film gives me hope, because the girl and the mother choose hope for a brighter future, beyond the mountains.
“Down from the Mountain” won the top honor by World Press Photo in Digital Storytelling Long Form Category. It’s a co-production of China File and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Muyi, as Director of Visuals at China File, is getting credit as producer.