Urban China in Transition
saturday june 9 | 11.00 hrs | Dutch premiere

Our Courtyard: Bai People of South West China
Yang used to live with his two uncles in his ancestral courtyard home. As a result of the collectivization in the 1950’s, his uncles were assigned ‘landlord’ class status, stripped of their property rights and evicted. Because Yang enjoyed ‘middle peasant’ status, he was allowed to stay. Today in post-Reform China’s market economy, property rights have been restored and many Chinese are seeking to better their living conditions. This documentary opens the gate to the Yang ancestral courtyard. It sheds light on the lives and emotions of the family as they look into the past and towards the future for guidance on how to secure a home in which they and the future generations of Yangs can continue to prosper.

Frode Storaas (Norway) and He Yuan Wang (China) | China | 2006 | 59 min | English subtitles

camera: Frode Storaas and He Yuan Wang
sound: Frode Stroraas and He Yuan Wang
editor: He Yuan Wang
producer: Frode Storaas

contact: Frode Stroraas (University of Bergen, Norway)
t: +47 55588172
e: frode.storaas@bm.uib.no

Frode Storaas is Associate Professor at Bergen Museum, University of Bergen. His research interests are pastoralism / nomadism, agro-pastoralism, development issues, ethnicity and conflicts, as well as visual anthropology. Storaas specializes regionally in East and Southern Africa, North America and Norway. He has been making documentaries and other visual documentations from Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, USA, China and Norway.
Mr. He Yuan was born in 1975. He graduated in 2001 from Yunnan University, and majored in Visual Anthropology. He is among the staff of the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences.