Director Zhang Tongdao.[Photo provided to China Daily]
Since 2006, veteran director Zhang Tongdao has trained his lens on a dozen children, continuously documenting their failures and fortunes for a series of films and TV shows, Wang Kaihao reports.
In justifying the length of time it has taken to complete his latest project, veteran director Zhang Tongdao will probably point to his American counterpart, Richard Linklater, who spent 12 years filming the drama, Boyhood.
However, while Linklater's piece was fictional, Zhang's long-term production about human growth is compellingly real.
Since 2006, Zhang's lens has followed more than a dozen young people who were born after 2000-those often referred to globally as Generation Z, or Gen Z, but colloquially known as the "post-2000" or "post-00" generation in China. When he first started the project, the children were attending a kindergarten in Beijing. However, as his camera kept rolling, audiences grew up with them as the magic of time unraveled their real-life dramas.
With the footage he has collected over the past 12 years, he has released two films and one TV documentary-Kids Kingdom in 2009, Post-00 Generation (TV) in 2017 and Born in 2000 in 2019-recording different periods of the children's lives, from kindergarten, to middle school, then to high school and college.
"Time is the best screenwriter," explains 54-year-old Zhang, who also works as a media professor at Beijing Normal University. "All I need to do is record."
In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization. It wasn't long before Chinese families began to travel abroad more often, own cars, and on the whole grow wealthier, he says.
Chi Yiyang.[Photo provided to China Daily]
"I had a feeling that the post-00 generation, growing up in that social context, would become a thoroughly different type of adult," Zhang explains. "As a documentary director, I wanted to show the change happening from the very beginning."
He released Kids Kingdom in 2009, a film that recorded the children's daily lives in kindergarten, to show human nature from their perspective without any dramatic performances.
Inevitably, some stereotypical labels, like how "self-centered" kids of that generation are, arise in the documentary. However, Zhang's point of view suggests that, if one looks at it from a different perspective, it could be seen as a manifesto that declares their personality.
In the film, one of the children, barely 3 years old, explains why he remains silent most of time by stating: "Everyone has their own choice. This is what I like, and it is my right to do so."
"We were surprised, but convinced," the director says. "Imagine if, in the future, a group of people with even more open minds and independent thoughts could represent China in the world arena-we would naturally turn a page on the way we deal with international affairs."
Wang Sirou.[Photo provided to China Daily]
Life finds its own way
To reflect the development of the children as a result of their choices, a five-episode TV documentary, Post-00 Generation, was broadcast on China Central Television in 2017.The best friends from kindergarten each set off on different paths in life, whether by accepting an "orthodox "education at schools in Beijing, or by living abroad. Some things, however, did not change: The boy who had "his own choice" is still not talkative in public, even in his teens.
For the production team, Chi Yiyang and Wang Sirou, both 18 now, are "two children with outstanding personalities and with the most attractive stories" among the group in Kids Kingdom.
The latest production in Zhang's long-term project, Born in 2000, features the two young people, who were deliberately omitted from Post-00 Generation, and hit art house cinema screens across the nation on Sept 3.
According to executive director Yu Ming, the team extracted nearly 300 hours of footage of just Chi and Wang from among the total 1,000-plus hours of material that has been accumulated since the start of the project.
"It was not an anthropological experiment to gather an abundance of material from a series of samples," Yu says. "But there were so many surprises that we had to keep our camera rolling."
Chi, once the naughtiest boy in the kindergarten who always wanted to be a "hero", faces new challenges. Feeling aimless at school, Chi says that he doesn't even know what he wants to do in the future. He rediscovers his sense of confidence and purpose on the field, representing China at a global competition as part of its national youth American football team.
Wang, who is called Rose in the documentary, has dreamed of being a "princess" since she was a little girl. However, studying in the United States at a Texas high school, far from her parents, she struggles with the harsh realities of her situation. Tense relationships with her host families and classmates make her doubt whether she made the right choice to study abroad.
As the documentary unfolds, her story reveals a silver lining that will have a huge impact on her future.
"What really impressed me is that the parents were very supportive of their offspring's personal decisions," Zhang says. "When problems arose, they didn't scold their children, but worked through the issue and tried to be reasonable."
According to Fan Qipeng, producer of Born in 2000, the documentary is set to be screened in the US later this year, giving overseas audiences a fresh understanding of China's younger generation.
Chi Yiyang and Wang Sirou, both 18 now, have had their lives recorded for 12 years since kindergarten, as shown in a recent documentary, Born in 2000, created by director Zhang Tongdao and his team. Chi, now a high school graduate, visits his kindergarten and meets one of his teachers there in Beijing.[Photo provided to China Daily]
New age, new challenge
Kids Kingdom and Post-00 Generation have both enjoyed much critical acclaim, winning awards from various TV and film festivals at home and abroad, as well as being highly rated on Chinese review site Douban, scoring over 8 points out of 10.
The director expects Born in 2000 to inspire deeper thinking among Chinese parents about the education of their children, who face a plethora of anxiety-inducing scenarios unknown to previous generations and confront increasing amounts of pressure.
When asked if people in the documentary have remained "genuine "in the time they have grown up in front of the camera, Zhang is pragmatic in his answer.
"No documentary can be 100 percent true, and an adult will always 'perform' before the camera in some way," he concedes. "However, how many people can keep up a performance if they are recorded for years? Time will always reveal the answer."
Zhang also notes that, in recent years, his project has been confronted with accusations of not being "representative" enough. The question, he recalls goes something like this: "How can several kids from a few middle-class families in downtown Beijing speak for a whole generation?"
His response is thoughtful. "No individual can represent a whole generation from every perspective. However, DNA of the time is left on every individual.
"Growing pains, like puppy love, failure and confusion, as reflected in the documentary can be shared by a whole generation, no matter whether it's a child in a big city or a small county," Zhang explains.
The director adds that he has benefited from this 12-year journey on a deeply personal level.
"I respect my own two children. One of them is also of the post-2000 generation and, therefore, has a very good relationship with the youngsters on the screen," he says with a smile.
"Even with my own children, I have a habit of recording their life. I plan to edit the footage into short films and present them as gifts at their weddings in the future."
