Nanyang odyssey

Zhou Bing and his team visit nine countries in Southeast Asia to shoot South of the Ocean.

Zhou Bing: Faces that touched my heart (Chinese)

Escapism from a 'vulgar' filmmaker

In the ensuing years, he made multiple-episode documentaries on the Dunhuang Grottoes; the Peking Opera legend Mei Lanfang; the Bund in Shanghai; the Louvre; the Palace Museum of Taipei; and, of course, the wildly successfully Forbidden City series.

About half of the projects were commissioned rather than initiated by himself, but they all enticed him with challenges. One of the challenges is the mountain of information from which he has to cull the most relevant and most exciting to be used in his films. He does not shove it to a team of researchers, but would conduct the in-depth probe himself so that he has a firm grasp of the subject matter.

For the first episode of The Forbidden City, for which he wrote a 6,000-word script, he devoured historical documents to the tune of more than a million words. "We even made discoveries that went beyond what the scholars knew, so our film benefited their research."

Zhou experimented with the BBC format of using an expert who acted as a guide for his film on the Great Wall. But he is not optimistic about the format in China because, as he sees it, it would require talents who must project trustworthiness and eloquence as well as knowledge and erudition. "Most of the time, we would use a narration and a voice-over that is a friendly third person and an all-knowing god, sight unseen."

For his next project, Zhou intends to make a film on traditional Chinese medicine, which will ruffle a few feathers as the topic is polarizing.

"I'll incorporate differing views on it," he notes. But above all, he wants to show TCM as "part of China's ancient value system and a vital expression of the culture".

He even dreams of venturing into the realm of fictional feature films, but it has to be about ancient Chinese history and he does not trust others to do the script for him.

"It must be the Chinese cultural genes inside me. Whether I do a documentary or a fictional feature or even a cartoon, I want it to carry on traditional culture and values. It can be entertaining and it must have strong aesthetics, but ultimately you're responsible for contributing to the cultural heritage. It's a burden I carry on my shoulders."

The series will air on CCTV9 from Dec 20 to 29, with one new episode per night at 10.