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Singing a tune for ‘My Love-Li Sister’

CCTV.com

12-07-2016 16:29 BJT

By CNTV Panview editor team

Editor’s foreword: "Looking China" International Youth Film Project is co-organized by the Academy for International Communication of Chinese Culture (AICCC), Beijing Normal University and Huilin Foundation, which aims to showcase the contrasting simplicity and glamour, the antiquity and fashion of China through unique perspectives of young foreign film makers.

As of year 2016, 101 students from 25 countries were invited to participate in the project. They were stationed in 13 municipality, provinces and autonomous regions here in China. Every filmmaker has worked out a 10-minute short film about Chinese culture around the topic of “ethnic minority”.

From Nov. 30, CNTV Panview is to post the selected and best films of this series. Here is the second place winner for today.

The film, ‘My Love-Li Sister’ starts off in a humorous manner, filming four elderly Li-ethnic community women, who appear to be very drunk, while singing and laughing at night. They are attending a special festival to encourage young single people to find their soul mates to marry.

The film director Ena Omerovic, a Bosnia-native who studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, follows a 30-year-old single woman, Xiaopan, in search for a future husband. She’s a beautiful flight attendant for Hainan Airlines, living in the Hainan island’s capital city - Haikou.

Unfortunately, she does not meet a lifelong companion, but she stays in an uplifting spirit, believing in herself that one day she will meet her Mr. Right.

What’s interesting is that in ancient Li-ethnic custom, if a single man sought to woo a woman to marry, he first approached her by singing and if she replied in song, they were destined to marry each other.

In Xiaopan’s village, there was indeed a man, who followed this custom, but he was the only one and elderly widower. Hence, the film has a happy ending. 

 

( The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Panview or CCTV.com. )

  

Panview offers a new window of understanding the world as well as China through the views, opinions, and analysis of experts. We also welcome outside submissions, so feel free to send in your own editorials to "globalopinion@vip.cntv.cn" for consideration.

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