What happens when hundreds of Chinese labourers ‒ from textile, agriculture, transport, and construction ‒ film their own lives, and these fragments are assembled into a shared cinematic form? This talk reflects on This is Life (烟火人间, 2024), a documentary built from 887 vertical videos contributed by 509 workers via the Kuaishou platform. The discussion centres on the aesthetics and meaning-making processes of what Dr Wang calls People’s Cinema ‒ a participatory documentary mode built from acts of self-narration. Special attention is given to how vertical mobile footage revitalizes horizontal cinematic conventions through multi-vertical split-screen, and how meaning is co-produced through the video entanglement of filming, assembling, and watching. In this model, labourers are both creators and subjects, merging self-expression with public visibility. Together, these user-generated content (UGC) form a collective screen through which contemporary China is re-imagined and re-presented in the cinematic space.

Dr Jing Wang is a Tsinghua Zijing Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, jointly based at the China Centre and the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Her research focuses on documentary studies, realist cinema, and visual anthropology. With over 12 years of experience as a documentary filmmaker, she integrates academic inquiry with creative practice in projects such as This is Life (2024, Producer). Dr Wang is currently completing her first monograph, Documentary in Fiction: Global Aesthetic Trends in Realistic Film During the Post-Cold War Era, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.