Welcome Back

First off Welcome! This is the new home of where I’ll be writing. If you’re coming from substack, double welcome! My last go at this sputtered out (not too long before starting on the film I’ll be writing about today and in the future) but also since then Substack has defended hosting white supremacist blogs. This decisions plus the feeling that a fresh start might be a good thing for my writing puts us here are on Beehiiv!

To get this going I’ll be doing a series of sorts, for the past year my wife and I have been working on our first film. Along the way we’ve learned so much that I need to get down in writing, hopefully it’ll be helpful for you to hear about our experiences. Most mistakes are worth making, going through the process is the most important part; you’ll make these mistakes but make them in your own way.

So Let’s get it going!

A year ago this week my wife and I were battling 16 hour jet lag after spending 2 months in China with her family. Three weeks of that trip was spent in the countryside filming and for the past 10 months we’ve been editing. My wife grew up in Southern China, Guizhou is a rural and mountainous province of China. Tucked into the southwest part of the country it’s one of the smaller and least educated provinces. It’s also one of the most ethnically diverse, the mountains and lack of regional public transportation has protected the area’s ethnic minority groups. However, with that cultural protection comes isolation, but in a modern China (and anywhere for that matter) access to the outer world is key for the survival of any rural community.

In the summer of 2023 my wife and I received the following video in the group chat we have with her parents. They had taken the bullet train out to the countryside to watch an amateur soccer league.

We both immediately started texting them questions. Soccer is the one sport I follow and I love lower league soccer so I thought this was the coolest thing ever. I wanted to go to a game when we visit. My wife was trying to figure out where they were and what the games were called. After some more searching we found the name “Cunchao” which directly translates to “Super Village”. It’s a soccer league between villages in a rural part of the province where each village makes a team comprised of villagers. The winning team receives a water buffalo, second place gets three goats and the third place team receives a pig. In addition the games, there are performances during halftime and pregame from the villages in traditional outfits and musical instruments. There are three main ethnic groups in the region but you’ll see variation from village to village. The performances are colorful and mesmerizing. In some ways they’re “better” than the actual soccer games. It has been going on for over a decade but went viral in 2023 (hence my parents in law checking it out). 2 million people visited the county that summer and another 50 million watched games online. The more we learned the more we wanted to go but it also became clear that we were both turning our filmmaker gears in the background. Being a huge fan of soccer I didn’t want to force it onto my wife, getting her to watch it has been enough of a process. I didn’t want to try to force her to film it and then edit it. Eventually she finally said the words “What if…” and it was off to the races.

There is a lot going on here, ethnic minorities celebrating their culture, the competition aspect of soccer, local bragging rights on the line and most importantly a community is fighting to protect it’s future. Universal truths are so important to documentaries and we could see this one almost immediately. Every rural community around the world deals with this issue, I grew up in a small one high school town. The pressures of making sure the town survives never leave. The ethnic minority aspect allows for a western audience to learn about Chinese culture, not politics. China is presented as a singular culture to the west yet there are over 50 recognized ethnic minorities in China. This is easy for me to say as someone married to a Chinese woman but so much of Chinese culture simply isn’t talked about to Americans. The soccer league between villages is the perfect on ramp to learn about Chinese culture. Sports are a universal language. If you know the rules, you can watch and play anywhere in the world. This was our way in with a western audience. Sprinkle in the competition that comes with a sports league and you have some drama. We felt really good about it.

The goal of this series is a professional reflection, I hope it’s helpful for you too but it isn’t going to be a list of what worked and what didn’t. I’m not even sure I’ll spend much time explaining what I’ll do different next time. Not every film is perfect, few are and this one definitely is not. However, the most important part is starting and finishing the film. This blog is going to help me make sure our film gets finished. With all of that said, I am unbelievably proud of this film, I know we’ll finish it this year and I can’t wait to share it with all of you. First up in this series will be researching and what we did in the months leading up to shooting China.

I’ll leave you with one more video my wife’s parents sent us from their visit out to Cunchao.

Until next time, keep shooting!