To echo Tessa’s comments, I think it is important for a filmmaker to be clear about the story they are telling. No story can be all things to all people, and no story can be THE story of reality. Many people attempt to tell REAL, ACTUAL or TRUTHFUL stories–all honorable pursuits–but as an audience for these stories, we have to be aware of their limitations.

At its best, a film will represent an accurate analogy for people, events and  ideas, as experienced by the filmmaker. If certain items are presented as facts, they will be thoroughly researched and verifiable. But again–the filmmaker must chose a focus to avoid telling a hundred stories that run the risk of being narrow and one-dimensional.

Our focus for this project has changed a lot since Tessa developed the original idea nine months ago. Instead of of interviewing mostly IE NGOs in Beijing, we also met with economists, professors, students, entrepreneurs and historians. As our information acquisition techniques grew more sophisticated, so did our understanding of the environmental movement in China. We now understand that there are many fronts of the “green” movement in China, but this is something that we needed to be here to learn.

To be truthful is to be loyal to your own experience–but it is also to be open to the UNKNOWN. If we had remained loyal our original narrative, we wouldn’t be telling the truth as we experienced it. The reason I am so confident that this is the story to tell–is because I know we’ve kept our minds ready for new lessons. And now the task is to convince our audience of that loyalty. Which is not the same thing as convincing them that we are telling the Truth with a capital ‘T’.

The post that I wrote yesterday was about the story that we won’t tell with our film. It seems like this is unavoidable in story-telling; no matter what story we tell, there will be many we don’t tell. And this story just got broader and also more specific each time we had a meeting about it, in a way similar to the meetings I conducted in Boston prior to our departure. I was looking through my project-notebook and finding loose ends and getting kind of frustrated by the size of this subject (and feeling like I have a life’s worth of further work to do here), and so we started to talk about what we won’t be able to say.

On our bus ride into the city,  we go through some towns that are just beginning to develop. These people haven’t been touched by the Olympics the way that others in Beijing have. We are telling the story of the people who have been affected by the Olympics, but it’s not all of China. We need to be explicit about our telling of only a part of the story. It’s difficult to weigh this against a fair and balanced framework. I guess truthfulness is more important than fairness and balance, and it’s possible to be truthful without balance.

Today was a cape-worthy day–not Tuesday though. I wrote a whole post about it, then I lost it, so this will be an abbreviated version. We met with Craig Quick, and he told us about the developing green building sector in Beijing. This was a very good meeting, bringing a different element to our work, which had been focused on the work IENGOs are doing in China.

more soon.

Yesterday we got to meet Ma Jun–who has been called China’s Rachel Carson. Time magazine called him one of the world’s 100-most influential people in 2006. I read Ma Jun’s book–China’s Water Crisis–when I was doing research in Kunming in 2005, and, for me, this helped to start my interest in China’s environment. Ma now is the director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in Beijing. We called Ma Jun after getting his cell phone number from Lingu–who was introduced to me by Libo, my Center for BioD and Indigenous Knowledge contact from Kunming–on a Saturday night around 8:00 and met him the next morning at 9am. quick! This is reflective of the speed at which development is happening China, I think. A Chinese friend said that I had been raising the eggs for years (I’ve been doing work regarding China’s environmental policy), and now I get to meet the hen.

Ma Jun talked about awareness building in China and how participation is key to developing some kind of environmental consciousness here. Ma said that, since he’s started doing work here, he’s noticed government policy change to emphasize environmental education. This reinforced what we’ve learned through talking to IENGOs here.

Yesterday we had no meetings, so we went into the city to get a good time lapse shot. This is when Jeff sets up the camera and records for one hour, then we watch it very fast so indicate busyness. Beijing is a good place to take shots like this. We had taken one in the subway during rush hour as well. There are so many people here.

When we were taking this shot, I went to go find a cheap shirt, because I had spilled chocolate icecream on my shirt, and we were meeting Tony and his friend for dinner after we got the time lapse shot. This took me a long time, but I found a good one I think. It is a good amount of ridiculous.

Yesterday Jeff and I had some meetings at Peking University that really wrapped together a lot of what we had been talking about. Jeff needed someone to tell us on camera a lot of the things I had been telling him anecdotally, and the professors at the University yesterday really spelled out some important points for us. It was very encouraging.

Today we meet with more students and also with my first conservation hero. I’m very excited about this meeting, because I have not seen Libo since I worked with him in Kunming, China, in 2005. We also are meeting with students who were involved in EE programs at their school. The way that environmentalism is structured in China is so exciting to me. The government of China has mandated creativity in schools, and by allowing students to be creative, environmentalism is developing in an emergent system that will feel it’s effects over time. This is the foundation for all of my hopefulness about China, and the meeting yesterday reinforced this hopefulness for me.

Tessa and I made it to the men’s Kayak/Canoe finals with some tickets that a friend gave to us. It was nice to get into a venue and feel the Olympic fervor. We got some good shots of Slovakian fans chanting and waving flags. Also, we got a first-hand look at some of the tech that Beijing is employing here like a camera hung by cables that can follow a person on a track. More and more I am impressed by the technological level of this city and country.

The thunder and lightning storm a couple of days ago for sure cleared the sky and we’ve had a couple of BEAUTIFUL blue sky days in the meantime. Yesterday we had a meeting with Ellen Carberry–a venture partner at HAO capital–about the Clean Tech in China Report that she helped work on and Clean Development Mechanisms. Ellen has since given us information about the development of Clean Power in China. At The Climate Group, Steve Howard and Changhua Wu say,  “In the move to a low carbon economy, we believe that China will no longer be a developing country following where others have led, but a pioneer leading the way.” and we sat outside mid-day and I got a sunburn. blue sky!

Jeff and I just spoke about whether we think the Olympics has served as a catalyst and an impetus to a movement that was already beginning in China. I think the movement was starting in 2005 when I was in Kunming. I therefore fell in love with the hopefulness that I saw here, and continue to see. It is the next place where things are happening. This dynamic we can maybe show by pairing it with China’s sweeping of medals in the Olympics. We are talking to someone tomorrow about the history of metals won compared to home court advantage in the past Olympics too, to put China’s sweeping into perspective.

As I’m waiting to get the Internet reconnected in our homestay—it’s a thunder and lightning storm, so the Internet disconnected itself—I am wondering what I can do without the Internet. My computer tells me I have access to an excellent connection, but in China, there are always caveats to excellent connections.

Jeff and I are continuing to plow ahead with IENGO meetings, because this is where my contacts are. Although I’ve made connections with the people who organized the green buildings for the Olympics, and we’re in the process of setting up a meeting with people who are concerned with carbon trading and with environmental law. Also the person who runs our “homestay” is planning to develop his facilities, and he has talked about the government subsidies that are available to development if it’s in a “green” way. Including this in the film may be too anecdotal though.

Also we are starting to look to post-production, and–if this Internet ever gets straightened out—I am finally having a chance to check out some video editors who were recommended to me when I was working in Boston.

I had two hours of work to do on the computer scheduled today, and I’m going to get about 20 minutes worth of work done and 80 minutes of frustration due to this thunder storm. If I didn’t have a huge project to get done, I would enjoy being affected by the weather in this way. O.K. now The Man is coming to fix the problem. Perfect. Mei wenti.

Jeff just predicted that the last week of this trip might be full of all the things we’ve pushed off until this point and meeting with the people who we have not connected with yet. He said that the next week will get busier. Jeff is taking a break this morning and going to buy cheap Chinese clothes with our cook—who we’ve become great friends with—and I’m having dinner with my second grade teacher (!) and her daughter tonight. We need to take breaths like this I guess.

Yesterday was definitely a Blue Sky Day. It was beautiful.