Located on the southeast coast of Fujian Province, Quanzhou was once one of the biggest ports in the world. About 700 years ago, when Italian explorer Marco Polo departed from ancient China, it was from Quanzhou that he began his journey home along the Maritime Silk Road.

Quanzhou, then known as Zayton overseas, attracted a large number of merchants from across the world and their goods were piled up on its docks, in its warehouses and across its markets. Polo was surprised by its prosperity and hailed it as "a great and noble city."

In 2021, Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China (960-1368), which features 22 historical sites and monuments in the city, was included on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The listing not only recognizes the significance of the spatial structure of the city, but also its role as a maritime hub in the ancient global trade network. Today, the city continues this role as a hub on the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, a key component of the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to promote connectivity between China and the rest of Asia, Africa and Europe.

On July 3, the city entered the global spotlight again with the opening of the Maritime Silk Road International Documentary Film Festival. The four-day event brought together more than 400 industry insiders from China and abroad to exchange ideas about building an international platform for documentary production.

"This thematic documentary conference is held to mark the 10th anniversary of the Maritime Silk Road. It will play a crucial role in promoting openness and inclusiveness and recording the changes of the times," Lu Cairong, Vice President of China International Communications Group (CICG), said at the opening ceremony.

Belt and Road Initiative

Featuring a series of activities such as documentary forums, screenings of exceptional documentaries, and exchanges between celebrated filmmakers, the festival also launched the Maritime Silk Road International Documentary Film Festival Initiative.

The initiative encourages "countries and regions along the Maritime Silk Road to continue to promote exchange and dialogue among different civilizations and commit to dealing with the common challenges the world is facing."

Documentaries are albums of humankind and a bridge to promote understanding and friendship between different countries, Lu said.

In 2013, China proposed cooperating with other countries to build a Silk Road Economic Belt and a 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road, known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Since then, the framework for building a community with a shared future for humanity has seen progress in policy coordination, connectivity of infrastructure, trade and people-to-people ties.

"The ancient Silk Road has contributed to the development of the world for thousands of years and shaped a spirit that embodies peace and cooperation, openness and inclusiveness, mutual learning, and mutual benefit. The ancient Silk Road is a shared and precious heritage of human civilization, and the Belt and Road Initiative is a continuation of that spirit," Lu said.

He hopes that documentary filmmakers around the world will offer audiences a deep understanding of the Belt and Road Initiative, and that people of different nationalities, languages and beliefs will develop a better understanding of the initiative.

International cooperation

The international documentary film festival in Quanzhou offers a platform for international documentary co-production.

"Through co-production, we can explain the path and philosophy of China's development more vividly. We hope that our joint efforts can build the Maritime Silk Road International Documentary Film Festival into a high-level platform for industry dialogue," CICG Vice President Lu said.

Through cooperation, CICG and British director Michael Lachmann began producing Space Time Capsule, the second season of Future Fantastic: China's Science Revolution, last September. The three-episode second season records the stories of Chinese scientists in their exploration of the unknown and is set to be broadcast internationally later this year.

The five episodes of the documentary's first season, released last year, featured the innovative achievements of dozens of top Chinese scientists.

At the documentary film festival, Paul Lewis, Conference Director of the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers, said that as a Canadian, international co-productions have always made a lot of sense.

"Canada is a huge country—the second largest in the world after Russia—with a population only about the size of Fujian. So we can't fund big-budget documentaries by ourselves. We need help. And international co-productions are an obvious answer," he explained.

Lewis said he believes that, more importantly, co-production is a way to access exciting new stories and new talent, find new partners, and diversify programming. He continued that this kind of cooperation can bring the world to Canada and Canada to the rest of the world.

Lewis has talked to many filmmakers in the Asian market and regards Asia as a source of rich stories never before told in the West.

It is not easy to successfully engage in international co-production, which requires partners to overcome differences in culture, language, editorial direction and expectations; and also requires patience, compromise and a huge amount of goodwill, he said.

The senior filmmaker said that with the current global economic slowdown, engaging in international co-production will be a popular way to manage budgets. "But let's take a leadership position and move beyond what's simply best for bottom-line profitability. Let's do international co-production out of a sense of joy. The joy of learning. The joy of discovery," he said.

Capturing young hearts

The film festival also highlighted the importance of youth for documentary production.

"We are learning from young people. We should learn about their attitudes toward life experience, which can offer different ways to narrate stories," Zhang Tongdao, professor at the School of Arts and Communication, Beijing Normal University (BNU), said. Zhang, also head of BNU's Documentary Center, emphasized that the industry should give more say to young filmmakers who are likely to propose innovative and interesting ideas.

"Young people are full of curiosity about the future world, and we aim to satisfy this curiosity through our documentaries," Zhu Xianliang, senior advisor of factual content at online video-sharing platform bilibili, said at a parallel forum of the film festival on July 3.

Of China's many popular video-sharing sites, bilibili draws the largest group of young Chinese users. Since 2017, the website has aired over 4,700 documentaries, produced 122 documentaries and won more than 100 domestic and international awards.

Last year, the number of documentary viewers on the website reached 160 million, making it the second most popular genre on bilibili and making the platform one of the largest documentary platforms and producers in China.

Documentary director Qin Bo has created many works on social phenomena and the lives of ordinary people, which have been very popular on the bilibili website. He likes communicating with young people directly on social platforms or through bullet comments, comments that scroll across the screen in real time during videos on bilibili.

"Compared with other genres, documentaries can explain the complexities of society and human nature more objectively, and we should explain these complexities in a gentle and patient way," Qin said. Talking with young viewers brings about a collision of different world views, which is a unique and inspirational experience for documentary creators, Qin said.

(Printed Edition Title: History in the Making)

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson

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