Yilan’s Loss of Farmland Documented in Film by Kids

In July and August of 2015, five 12-year-olds from Pei-cheng Elementary School braved the hot sun, taking their camera equipment to the fields to capture beautiful images of lush green seas of paddy rice caressed by gentle breezes. Focused on the images in front of the camera, they gained a true sense of the beauty of their hometown.

As the camera panned out, capturing the vast expanses of farmland, they noticed that the land was studded with newly developed “farmhouses” in colors that made for a jarring contrast with the earth tones of the fields. These villas had encroached on farmland, taking much acreage out of cultivation.

In fact, the children had always been aware of this phenomenon, but they had previously lacked a chance to gain a deeper understanding of it.

Since the Xueshan Tunnel was completed, connecting Taipei to Yilan, the desires of city people to live amid the fields have changed the character of Yilan’s countryside. The bucolic fields of paddy rice are no longer as expansive as they once were.

Media studies in Eastern Taiwan

Yilan County’s Pei-cheng Elementary is the only school in Eastern Taiwan that sees itself as a “media literacy center.” In addition to a school newspaper, the campus includes a small production studio, which is available to students in the school’s middle and upper grades who are members of its journalism club. The studio offers students chances to immerse themselves in media production, whether by conducting interviews, broadcasting news, or hosting live events. And they frequently go off campus to shoot videos. 

A team of passionate teachers with expertise in the field took this small production studio and turned it into Pei-cheng Television. More than a means for teachers to convey their knowledge, the station offers chances for students to express and organize their thoughts through the media production process. Meanwhile, teachers can participate in related teacher development courses. 

Since 2010 the teacher Li Yi-luen, a passionate photographer, has been hoping to make media education universal. Consequently, he got together with some homeroom teachers and came up with a plan to use three general education class periods per week to teach courses in multimedia and video production. They hired some outside lecturers and local reporters to help teach the classes and to lead students on reporting field trips.

Local Yilan photographer Lin Ming-ren shared 20 years of aerial photographs with the students as documentary evidence, allowing them to see the changes to the local landscape for themselves.

These images caused many children to ask questions about the recent construction of “farmhouses” that in fact are typically villas built on farmland but owned by non-farmers. In response, Li Yi-luen took the class to an agricultural education symposium. The symposium had invited Leo Fang, a partner at an advocacy workshop in Yilan that is trying to preserve farmland, and Lin Che-an, the owner of the Tiandong rice brand. The two men are sparing no effort to preserve Yilan’s farmlands. As they told their own stories, they sparked in the children a desire to carry out in-depth investigations.

“Those two young men were small farmers, and after their talk the children were very excited,” says their teacher Li, who was born and raised in Yilan himself and has shared his photographs and his memories with the students. “What’s more, with all the debate over the Regulations Governing Agricultural Dwelling Houses in the news later that year, I asked them to go back home and discuss the issue with their parents, and write down their thoughts. It was only then that I discovered that although the children felt passionately about local land-use issues, they usually had no means to express their feelings.” 

So he suggested that they make a film that focused on the issue of “farmhouse” development. Immediately, the five children were taken with the idea. But they were at first uncertain about the specific theme of the film and about what production methods to use. From a film production standpoint, they were starting from scratch.

By documenting their hometown with a camera and capturing the voices of people from different walks of life, these children have done their part to protect what makes Yilan a unique place.

Letting the kids find their own way

Throughout the process, Li limited his involvement: “To develop a passion, children need to be self-motivated. From discussing and choosing the topic to shooting and editing and even to arranging interviews… I let the children handle all that themselves. I just served as a gopher and driver.”   

Just before they started shooting, the fields happened to be high and heavy with rice. The teacher led his students to an area of Yilan famed for its bucolic scenery to investigate. Only after the food for thought provided by that experience did they begin to have storyboarding discussions. “Several times I threw out various questions for the team to consider. I included content from news programs about the debate over the Regulations Governing Agricultural Dwelling Houses, and I took them to experience harvesting rice with the farmer Lai Ching-song. With more experience under their belt, they then went on to discuss how they wanted to put together the film and write the script.” Li recalls that from the get-go the children were full of creative ideas.

Tian (“field”) and man (“full”), the two characters of the film’s Chinese name, are also homonyms for characters that mean “fill to the brim.” They suggest a sense of happiness and successful completion.

The production team also felt that “field” suggested the image of people joining hands to work the land together, whether in lush green fields of young rice plants or in golden yellow fields of rice nearing harvest. What’s more, fields provide habitat for birds, insects and people. They create a scene of beauty and happiness.

The documentary took two months of summer vacation to shoot, and it has sparked a craze for filmmaking among the students’ schoolmates. Many of them are hurrying to finish their own film projects before graduation. (photo by Chuang Kung-ju)

Hands-on experience

Tsai Chen-wei, the tallest and biggest kid on the team, wanted the top position of director and succeeded in getting it, but the job turned out to involve a lot of drudgery and frustration. Whenever the production hit difficulties, the other students would ask Tsai to deal with them. And when the teachers noticed issues that needed attention, they too would ask Tsai to handle them. “The teacher shouldn’t get involved too much, for that would stifle the children’s creativity,” Li says. “Consequently, a lot of the burden was put on the director. He had it the toughest.”
Tsai, 12, was in fact quite nervous the first time his students called him “Director Tsai.” “The truth is I had never thought I was capable of completing such a project,” he confesses. “I was deeply moved by the fact that these two big brothers [Leo Fang and Lin Che-an] hadn’t moved elsewhere for better job prospects like most young locals in their 20s and 30s. Instead, they chose to come home and help old farmers with their local farmland conservation efforts. What they’ve done is pretty impressive.”

When the team went to interview the old farmer Chen Wen-lien for the documentary, Tsai learned that he would have to prepare topics for discussion ahead of time and would have to conduct the whole interview in Taiwanese if he were to garner the trust of seniors. Afterwards, they had to translate the conversation into Mandarin and transcribe it word for word for the subtitles. It was a lesson about the importance of Taiwanese when conducting interviews in rural locations.

For the sake of journalistic balance, Huang Chun-chieh, another boy on the production team, persuaded his mother to ask one of her relatives who was the owner of a farmhouse villa to be interviewed. When asking questions on camera, he has quite a commanding presence. “After this experience, when I see problems now, I always want to know the root causes,” Huang says. “My ability to think for myself has improved a lot.”

The documentary took two months of summer vacation to shoot, and it has sparked a craze for filmmaking among the students’ schoolmates. Many of them are hurrying to finish their own film projects before graduation.

Music, aerial shots, stop-motion

In order to give the children access to better equipment, the teachers spent a lot of their own money. They insisted that the children even gain experience with aerial shots.

Lin You-jung, the girl tasked with operating the drone that was used for the aerial shots, was in truth under a lot of pressure during filming. “In the blooper outtakes at the end of the film there’s a clip of the drone crashing,” she recounts. “I was the one operating it. I was scared out of my wits, and I broke out in a cold sweat. The drone crashed in a ploughed field and then again on concrete. We were very lucky it wasn’t destroyed.” Lin had seen the documentary Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above, but she didn’t realize how hard the drones were to operate until she tried flying one herself.

Tseng Chieh-ling, the director of photography, had no previous experience. She says that documentary films shouldn’t present a point of view, but rather should show the true situation to enable people to make up their own minds. “Even though I don’t have any farmers in my family, I can now sympathize with their frustrations.”

The musical score of the segment of the film called “Diu Diu Tong” (“The Sound of Raindrops”) was adapted and performed on a liuqin (Chinese mandolin) by Tseng, who has studied Chinese classical music. She recalls that recording the music was a nerve-racking experience. The nostalgia it evokes for rural landscapes has proven to be quite moving to many viewers, and Tseng’s parents are proud of her for having the courage to adapt and perform the score by herself. 

The last segment of More Rice Field, More Happiness is a bit of stop-motion animation full of childlike joy—a nice ending to a film on the serious topic of farmland development. The segment, slightly over a minute in length, was edited by Huang Shu-fan. A great test of patience, it took a lot of time to create. Each second required at least eight different shots. Consequently, meeting her deadlines really cut into the amount of sleep she got.    

The instructor Li Yi-luen provided financial support so the children could rent a camera drone. By operating it, they were able to fully document the changes to the landscape, as well as broaden their own horizons.

Their next project

Like Huang Shu-fan, other members of the team also tried out innovations of their own, and the teachers encouraged this spirit of experimentation. Inevitably, there were some arguments about creative control, but these also provided an opportunity to learn about communication and how to express one’s opinions without hurting people’s feelings. Moreover, they were able to “argue their way” towards ideas to use in a second film.

“In our second work, we hope to document the spring planting process in its entirety, as well as explain the farming aspirations of Yang Wen-chuan, the former chief of the  Yilan County Agriculture Department,” reveals Tsai.

After More Rice Field, More Happiness was completed, a craze for filmmaking swept through Pei-cheng Elementary. Currently, the school has only two classes of students per grade, but there are already nine production teams hoping to finish films before they graduate. One of them wants to create a public service fundraising commercial for the United Way of Yilan County, a charitable organization that raises funds for social welfare purposes.

Tsai and the other four team members are already helping out as coaches for these new film teams, providing advice by drawing from their own experience as filmmakers. On the day before graduation, the school is putting on a graduation film festival, setting up a large screen to show the films.

The roots of film education have grown stronger as these 12-year-olds have taken advantage of an opportunity to make their voices heard. May their documentary stir consciousness about protecting what we love about our hometowns.

As Yilan struggles to strike a balance between environmental conservation and development, More Ricefield, More Happiness left the children who created the film optimistic that they could make a difference in their hometown’s future. This story will be continued, as a second film project awaits.