He is a renowned documentary director in China, and the chief expert at the Documentary Culture Research Center of Zhejiang University of Technology (ZJUT). He began filming documentaries at the age of 39, with works such as “Master in Forbidden City”, “Himalaya Ladder to Paradise” and “Life Is A Belief”. He is Xiao Han, a teacher at the School of Humanities at ZJUT. Recently, his work “Marvelous City” Season 2 was selected as one of the Top Ten Influential Documentaries of 2023 in China. Today, let’s get closer to this “slash middle-aged” man who tells Chinese stories through his documentaries -- Xiao Han.
At the age of 39, Xiao Han reached a turning point in his life and began filming his first documentary, “Li-jiang Facebook”. The source of Xiao Han’s creation is to discover stories of particularly vibrant and infectious individual lives. The pre-production of “Himalaya Ladder to Paradise” took 4 years, during which he sold his house and battled high-altitude sickness; the filming team of “Master in Forbidden City” lived with artifact restorers for 4 months, accumulating nearly 100,000 words of research materials; “Life Is A Belief” took 13 months of filming and covered 100,000 kilometers.
In “Marvelous City”, Xiao Han invited celebrities to join, recording the perseverance and experiences of different groups of people in each city with a combination of “1 celebrity plus 2 ordinary people”, evoking urban memories and emotional resonance among a large number of young people. Topics related to “Marvelous City” have garnered over 7 billion reads on Weibo, with nearly 1 billion video views across various platforms. “Marvelous City” also shoulders the mission of international communication. Its international version is broadcast on the overseas Discovery+ streaming platform, covering over 20 countries and regions, with nearly 200 million viewership subscriptions. The popularity of “Marvelous City” overseas represents a cross-cultural and cross-national recognition. Through his work, Xiao Han tells Chinese stories, strengthens cultural confidence, presents a credible, lovable, and respectable image of China, and constructs an excellent model for international narrative communication.
Since joining ZJUT in 2001, Xiao Han has been teaching for 22 years. Every summer vacation, Xiao Han collaborates with Research Center for Audiovisual Communication of Tsinghua University to offer a summer documentary filmmaking practice course. He takes students to grassroots levels for field investigations to find creative materials. Over the past 7 years, many students’ works have won awards at the West Lake Youth Documentary Forum. Some of these students even follow in Xiao Han’s footsteps after graduation, engaging in documentary and other film-related work.
