Cold War cameras meet communist medicine in a rare peek behind the bamboo curtain.
Diane Li, a graduate student in communication at the University of Stanford, was permitted for five weeks to visit the People’s Republic of China with her husband, a professor of Chinese law at Stanford, and a team of medical experts. Together they investigated and documented the training and work of China’s peasant paramedicals, the ‘barefoot doctors’. One of the first films about China made by an American of Chinese descent, Li’s documentary provides a rare glimpse of village life in the PRC at a time when Cold War tensions were easing between the United States and China.
Direction
Groundbreaking Chinese-American lens on closed communist China.
Production
Rare access during fragile US-China diplomatic thaw.
Director
Diane Li
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
US
