Tale of a true survivor

A soldier for all time

Deng people balance tradition in modern world

According to him, everyone was once young and have dreams. The older generation can't realize their singing dreams but young people can.

In October, the production received more than 5.07 million yuan from 29,166 supporters within 20 days on a Chinese crowd-funding website. One can get a film ticket and a premiere ceremony ticket at 60 yuan.

Fan considers it a creative way to improve Chinese documentaries. It's more like a custom-built movie documentary for fans.

"In China, hardly anyone is willing to pay to see documentaries in the theater. I want to change that and the first documentary to do that must be an entertaining one," he says.

He says in other countries, such as the United States, audiences are willing to buy a ticket for documentary. Art-house distribution companies have cooperated with small-art theaters for many years, so documentaries can be released in theaters.

But he says it's very difficult to do theatrical documentary in China. Documentary films should be diversified in themes, with professional production and capital-raising. It costs a lot of money to make a brilliant one.

His editing work on To Live Is Better Than to Die, which is about poor Chinese villagers from Henan province infected with AIDS/HIV because they sold blood illegally, won many global prizes. Director Chen Weijun used 30,000 yuan to buy a camera and Fan used 8,000 yuan to purchase a computer. That's the total cost of the documentary.

"Indeed, we can make an award-winning documentary with only 38,000 yuan. But do we really want all theatrical documentaries in China to have that same production value and cost when the country's GDP figure ranks second in the world?" he says.

"The first thing is to let Chinese audiences know that besides TV soaps, they can watch documentaries. When more and more documentary audiences emerge, there will be more people who like different documentaries."