Interview with Yang Yang
Where there are no walls, put windows. Where there is wilderness, light fires.

Editor's Note: Yang Yang’s journey from Xi’an to New York and eventually to Shanghai, her shift from music to documentary filmmaking, and her Jilu Commune project epitomize the transnational and transdisciplinary mobility of contemporary culture. And she has drawn on her multicultural experience to navigate longstanding challenges in the field of independent documentary filmmaking, above all its inadequate support systems and chronic lack of visibility and viability. Her personal trajectory mirrors the development and choices of China’s post-’90s generation against the backdrop of rampant globalization and the hardscrabble realities of independent cultural production within modern social structures. Hers is a story about finding one’s place in a sector caught up in constant flux. But it’s also a broader inquiry into how idealists can, through constructive practice, create creative space within narrow constraints.

By Yang Yang; Yun Chen

High school in Colorado

Yang Yang was born in Xi’an, China, in 1992. Her mother was an accountant and her father an engineer. Her parents sent her to a private elementary school in Xi’an – for a most unusual and rather amusing reason: “When my mom went to check out the school, she saw they had a synthetic running track. Her eyes lit up and she made up her mind on the spot: ‘My kid’s going here!’”

But by middle school, Yang recalls, she felt increasingly disillusioned with the school, especially after experiencing study-abroad summer programs in which she was exposed to radically different pedagogical approaches: “Kids abroad could run around barefoot on the lawn, wearing tank tops and eating ice cream, while I was stuck prepping for tests every day. Why? How was that fair?”
Deeply dissatisfied with the Chinese educational model, she made up her mind to transfer to a secondary school in the United States. In 2009, she enrolled as a sophomore at a high school in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley. Over the next three years, she “enjoyed every single day one hundred percent”, as she recalls, despite feeling homesick for a long time. This experience taught her early on how to balance family support and personal independence in a cross-cultural context.

Asked whether she felt anxious at the time about lacking direction, she says, “I wasn’t that conflicted. When it was time to apply to university, I quite naturally said I wanted to study music and film. My parents had no objections – they thought that was great.”

From music and art history to cooking and filmmaking

Yang Yang majored in music and art history at the University of Rochester, New York, where she felt “humbled by the sheer vastness of human knowledge” – and so excited about learning that she’d volunteer to carry books to the library “just to get a preview of what we’d be covering next”. It was a time of earnest and assiduous exploration – which to her was “pure joy”.

After graduating, she didn’t look for a job right away. Instead, inspired by her father’s credo that “nothing you learn is ever wasted”, she spent a year traveling and attending culinary school in the US. “That was in 2016,” she recalls, “when the elections were held. The atmosphere on American campuses was deeply divided. While everyone was arguing, I’d be in the kitchen, cooking. When the food was served, they’d quiet down and start eating. I began to subconsciously sanctify food – it felt like a kind of remedy.”

Another significant turning point came after watching Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown travel and food show on CNN. She was fascinated by the way it “portrayed food as a symbol of culture, global changes and interconnections”. Which, in turn, ultimately led to her interest in documentary filmmaking. “Food and film,” she points out, “are mediums that connect the world.”

Documentary filmmaking, public engagement and open sourcing in China

In 2019, for her final project at New York’s School of Visual Arts, she made a film about an artist in Bali who made artworks out of refuse, reflecting on the tension between overtourism and cultural preservation. She was awarded joint funding from National Geographic magazine and the BBC, which opened doors for her to a career in environmental documentary filmmaking. “I received a scholarship and joined the conservation community I had long admired, entering a world in which I wanted to connect and contribute.”

But the outbreak of the Covid pandemic in 2020 disrupted her career in the US. In August of that year, out of concern for her family, she returned to China – and bore the idea of her next project: “Jilu Commune” within the first two weeks upon landing. “Almost immediately after the quarantine, I attended the FreshPitch [新鲜提案] Factual Content Conference [真实影像大会] in Suzhou. At the closing dinner, I felt inspired to speak up. I pointed out that China had no open-source platform for documentaries. ‘Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to create one?’ I suggested.”

Initially, she was only planning to build a resource-based website: “I just wanted to turn the tools and open-source spirit I had learned in the US into something usable, so it was only meant to be a website.” Its content was “essentially a Chinese version of various creative resources: commonly used production templates, budgeting forms, call sheets, where to find archival materials, sources for free music, copyright guidelines, a global database of documentary film festivals and a talent directory.”

But as more people took notice, she gradually realized that “going it alone wasn’t enough: we had to try to build an ecosystem.” In the summer of 2021, she set up a team in Shanghai and began developing Jilu Commune into a non-profit organization to promote public engagement, knowledge sharing and cross-disciplinary collaboration in the documentary industry. “What I truly want boils down to one thing: social legitimacy. How many resources are open sources for everyone to use? If someone is interested in making documentaries, tools should be available for them to explore the medium on their own. I want to build that kind of ecosystem, to serve this community by establishing open collaborative mechanisms.”

Real-world challenges, burnout and lockdown in Shanghai

But the undertaking faced some daunting challenges. There is a “lack of social legitimacy” for independent documentaries in present-day China, owing to the absence of legal recognition and of a sustainable distribution system. “So many films remain unseen – which undermines any attempt by independent filmmakers to achieve economic viability and kindle public debate,” she deplores. “This is a global issue. It costs too much to acquire such films and the investment doesn’t pay for itself, so audiences are all too seldom exposed to thoughtful and artistic independent documentaries. Cultivating appreciation takes time.”

She points out the mental toll these structural deficits take on filmmakers: “They’re a drain on mental energy. Without real feedback and distribution, you have to muster even more passion to keep going. After three years, I’m burning out and this mental fatigue has even begun to affect my central nervous system.”

During the 2022 lockdown in Shanghai, she felt helpless against the forces of state control. “It felt very different from my time in New York, where I might not have been able to go everywhere I wanted, but at least I was free to walk down the street – no one would stop me. Even if it meant I’d have to bear the consequences if I got Covid. In Shanghai, we had no choices.” On the other hand, she was impressed by the good humor and resilience of the city’s residents. “I really came to appreciate the people here, their spirited resistance and insistence on making their voices heard, their incredible creativity and their sense of – even self-deprecating – humor.” All of which forged within her a deeper bond with the city.

A mobile generation and the inward focus of contemporary films

As a young creative frequently moving between China and the US, Yang has a unique perspective on mobility. “My classmates from Xi’an are now scattered all over, as far away as Bolivia, where one of them works as a diplomatic attaché. It’s hard to imagine that the same sixty people who once shared a tiny classroom in Xi’an are now spread across the globe. Meeting childhood friends in places like Brazil or Argentina feels surreal and fuels the perennial question: What makes so many of us choose to leave?”

The nature of migration has changed. For previous generations, being in a given place meant dealing with the concrete realities there. But now, with the advent of new technologies, the very idea of “being there” – the extent to which one is really “present” in a foreign country – has become a subject of reflection in and of itself.

With regard to documentary film production in present-day China, Yang notes that there are plenty of practitioners these days, but bemoans aesthetic shortcomings, a lack of conceptual depth, and an excessive and all too prominent inward focus.” At the turn of the millennium, a whole wave of powerful films came out with clear-cut political messages about social issues. In recent years, on the other hand, there’s been a noticeable trend toward personal imagery. I see this as a visible consequence of the narrowing space for public discourse,” she concludes. “As the demographic of filmmakers skews younger, the intellectual rigor of their films is declining. I seldom see films that truly move me. While each may have its merits, on the whole the connection these images have to the world portrayed – no matter how small that world may be – is fading. There’s too much introspection, even hints of narcissism, and too little focus on how things interrelate.”

Filmmaking as a response

Despite its numerous challenges, Yang Yang still believes in the intrinsic value of filmmaking. “When we choose to document, what reality are we actually recording? Is it the reality before our eyes, or the one in our minds, drawn from memory, or filtered through emotion? It all feels abstract, almost illusory. People need something to hold onto – something solid to grasp about a person, a career, a place. We all need an anchor. But I no longer believe anything lasts forever. In a world of impermanence, the only thing we can truly hold onto is ourselves. And the way to hold onto ourselves, I believe, is through action.”

Reflecting on the upbringing of her generation of Chinese artists and creatives, she observes that courage is often taught as a mix of self-sacrifice and fervor, with little emphasis on “succeeding through wisdom and perseverance”. “The models of courage we grew up with were all about burning passion and sacrifice. We rarely saw examples of calm, strategic perseverance, the kind that uses wisdom to achieve lasting change. Such examples were scarce, hard to learn from, and perhaps even discouraged.”

“What we truly need today,” Yang concludes, “is courage tempered with wisdom and endurance. Not the drama of grand sacrifice, but determination, persistence, day after day. Like that of Sister Aqing [阿庆嫂] [a Chinese folk heroine of the Sino-Japanese war], whose courage was profound. She treated adversaries and allies alike as guests who were just passing through, never as immutable fate. No one is bound by fate.”

THE INTERVIEWEE