The documentary "Aunt Haiyun", which took seven years to produce, will premiere on March 23 at 22:00 in the "Documentary Cinema" column of CCTV Documentary Channel (CCTV-9) of China Central Radio and Television. It will lead the audience into a "different seven years" with a wonderful story full of laughter and tears and the flavors of life.
Documentary "Auntie Haiyun" poster
"Auntie", or domestic service personnel, nanny, care worker, although this industry is indispensable to many families, "prejudice in people's hearts is a mountain", many people still think that being an aunt is a low-status job. Therefore, the creative team hopes to shoot a documentary to break the stereotypes that people always have about practitioners in this industry.
On New Year's Day in 2014, the filming team began filming the "aunties". When the filming team faced more than 1,000 aunties at the New Year's Day party, they were amazed and had no idea where to start. In the following three years, the team and the aunties gradually became familiar with each other. After a long wait, the "protagonist" that the filming team was looking for finally appeared.
Stills from the documentary "Aunt Haiyun"
Aunt Haiyun, 46 years old, has Mongolian ancestry, was laid off and divorced, but she never gave up on life, and never thought of giving up on her and her children's future. Thus, a seven-year filming journey officially kicked off.
The creative team said that during the seven-year tracking and filming process, the filming team was always paying attention to every detail of Aunt Haiyun's life, hoping to use objective, plain and calm records, eliminate any deliberately created suspense, and abandon all deliberate subjective emphasis, so that Haiyun in life can be presented intuitively in the camera and in front of the audience.
Stills from the documentary "Aunt Haiyun"
Now, "Aunt Haiyun", which condenses seven years of follow-up experience into 82 minutes, will finally be released on CCTV Documentary Channel, telling everyone what kind of extraordinary story this seemingly ordinary Aunt Haiyun has had in these seven years.
The documentary "Aunt Haiyun" truly and objectively presents Haiyun's journey from living in an "illegal building" when she first arrived in Beijing to settling down in a cozy "home" she purchased herself. It also records her gorgeous transformation from a "housekeeping novice" to a "gold medal confinement nanny".
Stills from the documentary "Aunt Haiyun"
In this documentary, the audience will follow the camera and follow the footsteps of Aunt Haiyun, traveling around Beijing's residential communities, shuttling through the streets and alleys of Inner Mongolia, visiting the many families she serves, and entering her life and inner world, to learn about the fresh developments in China's "auntie" industry and the current development status of the "confinement nanny" industry.
"A drop of water can reflect the sun's brilliance," said the film's director Li Jinxiong. Haiyun's story just highlights the tremendous changes that China's reform and opening up has brought to society and the huge opportunities for personal development.
The documentary "Auntie Haiyun" uses the character "Haiyun" to present not only the living conditions of ordinary domestic service workers like Haiyun in the current era, but also reflects the living conditions of nearly 30 million domestic service workers in today's rapid urbanization process in China, reflecting the booming development of China's tertiary industry.
After watching the documentary "Aunt Haiyun" as an ordinary audience, literary critic Zheng Bonong said that this work "has unearthed new changes and new progress in Chinese society from a social group that has received little attention in the past, and allowed me to hear the extraordinary footsteps of history from a very ordinary social group."
It is reported that the film will be released simultaneously on CCTV Video and iQiyi on March 24.
