Educational Media Reviews Online

Here is a good idea that lacks enough structure and organization to fulfill its promise. Her China Today is a documentary that records moments in the lives of five women who represent a range of lifestyles enjoyed by women in 21st century China. The five subjects include a graduate student majoring in English, a restaurant owner who typifies the successful female entrepreneur, a much less affluent self employed quilt maker, a retired worker, and a young stay-at-home mom. The economic circumstances, educational levels, and backgrounds of the subjects vary widely. What they all share is residence in Taiyuan, one of China’s smaller cities. Taiyuan has a population of 3,000,000, is located near the border with Mongolia, and is, perhaps, not as familiar to Western viewers as Beijing or Shanghai.

The film offers a number of brief interviews with each woman in which she discusses her work, her accomplishments, her hopes, and, toward the end, her dreams for the future. The interviews are interspersed with numerous short segments showing the subjects at their desks or other workplaces, going about their daily routines; relaxing with friends; and preparing and eating meals. The elderly pensioner is shown pursuing the activities that fill her day, which include physically demanding volunteer duties, like leading outdoor exercise classes and caring for grandchildren while both parents are at work. Each woman is seen alone and with others, interacting with colleagues (in the case of the quilt maker, with her husband, who shares the enterprise), or with friends and family at leisure and at home. The camera work is very good and seems to show the subjects in uncontrived settings, enriched by realistic scenes of Taiyuan.

With all of this good material, this should be a splendid example of its genre and easy to recommend with enthusiasm. However, perhaps in an attempt to be artistic, after introducing the five women very briefly (the viewer sees a shot of each one, hears her name, and sees the name as an English subtitle), the action jumps from one person and activity to another without smooth segues, seemingly without a logical progression. Very little information is furnished by the narrator to help the viewer follow the action, understand the points being made, or draw comparisons either among the lifestyles of the five subjects or between Chinese and Western lifestyles.

Technical aspects of the piece - sound, color, video, editing, pace - are generally good. However, the accented English spoken by some of the women - even the narrator, at some points - is not easy to understand. Subtitles for Chinese speech are readable, but their use could have been expanded to include the spoken English. Doing so might help viewers follow the unfolding story more easily and, thereby, gain greater understanding of what they see.

Not recommended.