{"id":29499,"date":"2019-05-16T09:54:40","date_gmt":"2019-05-16T13:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=29499"},"modified":"2024-07-02T17:11:24","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T17:11:24","slug":"cross-cultural-connections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=29499","title":{"rendered":"Cross-Cultural Connections"},"content":{"rendered":"

Documentary filmmaker Julia Haslett tells stories that transcend borders, giving her audience a window into worlds they couldn\u2019t have explored otherwise, and are already connected to in ways they couldn\u2019t have imagined.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Julia
Julia Haslett, a documentary filmmaker and assistant professor of communication, edits her films in her home office in Carrboro, North Carolina. (photo by Alyssa LaFaro)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cAttention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,\u201d wrote Simone Weil, a French philosopher and labor activist from the 1930s \u2014 and subject of documentary filmmaker Julia Haslett\u2019s<\/a> first feature-length film \u201cAn Encounter with Simone Weil<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this quote, Weil considers humanity\u2019s innate responsibility to help those in need, filling up volumes on the concepts of empathy and suffering before dying of self-starvation at age 34 in solidarity with those in Nazi-occupied France. It put into words what Haslett felt while working on a different project one year prior.<\/p>\n

\"For
For her most recent film project, Haslett films plant life on Jade Dragon Snow Mountain near Lijiang, Yunnan Province, China.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As a filmmaker-in-residence at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics, Haslett co-produced and co-directed a short film series, \u201cWorlds Apart<\/a>,\u201d examining sociocultural barriers in health care. The hundreds of patients she interviewed for the series, despite their unique stories and distinct backgrounds, all had one thing in common: They wanted someone to listen. \u201cThat one thing kept coming up,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cThat at the end of day, what they wanted more than anything else from their doctor is to feel like they were being listened to.\u201d<\/p>\n

About a year after leaving Stanford and relocating to New York City, she stumbled across Weil\u2019s quote and her volume of work. \u201cThat quote resonated for me because of my work on \u2018Worlds Apart,\u2019 and also just more generally with what I observed in the world,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cAs a documentarian, you\u2019re asked to listen to the stories and experiences of others and transform them into something through story. All you really can offer is your attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still inspired by Weil\u2019s words, Haslett\u2019s work continues to draw attention to people who may have been otherwise overlooked, bringing a sense of empathy and understanding to her viewers. Now, in her newest feature-length film, \u201cPushed Up the Mountain<\/a>,\u201d she links two countries separated by over 7,000 miles and hundreds of years of cultural divides, eliminating the distance between their citizens, even from across continents.<\/p>\n

Bridging two places<\/strong><\/p>\n

Born in England, Haslett has spent her life divided between two countries, living some years in the United Kingdom and some years in the United States. While these two nations are closely aligned in culture, they are still distinct, Haslett contends, and gave her a more global perspective from a young age.<\/p>\n

Haslett has studied and worked in the U.S. since high school, but she regularly visits family in the U.K., which continues to influence her life and her films. She found the inspiration for her latest film in her godfather\u2019s rhododendron garden in the Scottish Highlands.<\/p>\n

While there, she met a group of conservationists spending the weekend classifying its plants. She decided to make a whimsical short film about these people who\u2019ve dedicated their lives to the rhododendron, but in the process, she learned those plants had been brought from China \u2014 a nation with over 30,000 native plant species to the U.K.\u2019s 1,400 \u2014 over a hundred years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut when I was encountering them, in the early 21st century, they were endangered in China because of development, overexploitation, and climate change,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cSo people had started to reintroduce plants from Great Britain back to China, to help supplement the plants that were endangered there. Something about that trans-historical, transcultural return was fascinating to me.\u201d The project expanded from a short about a Scottish garden to a feature-length film including the complex history, culture, and traditions of nature conservation in a country of 3.7 million square miles.<\/p>\n

The film follows conservation biologists in both Scotland and China including Geng Yuying, a Chinese botanist who helped found the Huaxi Subalpine Botanic Garden \u2014 which focuses on cultivating these endangered plants in China\u2019s Sichuan province. Married to a Scotsman, Geng had to travel to Edinburgh to study these plants native to her home country. \u201cThe fact that she had to leave her own country to understand her own country was striking,\u201d Haslett says.<\/p>\n

Through Geng, Haslett explores the challenges and philosophy of conservation, including Geng\u2019s struggles to secure funding for her research on a little-known, little-cared about plant found only in China\u2019s remote mountains. The film documents attempts to connect the rhododendron to the more charismatic and famous panda bear to generate more interest \u2014 and therefore more funding \u2014 in the plant\u2019s conservation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf a species or genus has people advocating for it, its likelihood of survival is increased,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cAt the same time, that raises these big questions. Who are we as humans to be deciding what gets to survive and what doesn\u2019t?\u201d<\/p>\n

Back in Scotland, conservationists have a different problem: bad publicity. One specific species, Rhododendron ponticum, <\/em>has taken over. Its dense, rapid growth squeezes out other species, decreasing the biodiversity and health of local ecosystems. Millions of dollars have been spent to eradicate it from the countryside.<\/p>\n

\u201cNews headlines tend to just use the word \u2018rhododendron\u2019 instead of saying it\u2019s just one of over a thousand species in the rhododendron genus,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cAs a result, the people who are working to try to preserve the genus in Great Britain are up against this PR nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the film, she interviews conservationists from the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh, dedicated to restoring the public\u2019s opinion of rhododendrons, and a forester from the Scottish Forestry Commission, dedicated to killing them. In their exchange, she highlights the potential consequences of invasive species, a problem plaguing countries throughout the world.<\/p>\n

\"A
A rhododendron from China’s Yunnan Province, near the border of Myanmar.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Contrasting conservation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Growing at the highest altitudes, there\u2019s not much room left for rhododendrons. As the planet warms, plant species will have to shift their ranges to remain in the climates they grow best. For rhododendrons and other alpine species, that means gradually moving up the mountain to cooler temperatures. Eventually, as the Himalayan snowpack retreats, these plants will run out of space to climb to, foreshadowing the fight plant and animal species alike will endure in the upcoming decades.<\/p>\n

As climate change becomes a bigger piece of the conservation puzzle, scientists have to work hard to understand its impact on their research. \u201cTheir work is really just Herculean,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cTo understand the incremental change from one year to the next, you have to consistently go back to collect data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Haslett went with one conservationist, Fang Zhedong, into the mountains near Myanmar to find these plants in the wild, her camera and sound gear in tow. \u201cAt times I felt like I was filming for National Geographic,\u201d Haslett laughs.<\/p>\n

Their trip was the latest in a kind of data collection that started in the 19th century with adventurous scientists making the trek to find and photograph these plant species. Comparing the photos from the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> centuries to the ones taken in the 21st<\/sup> helps conservationists understand how much the mountain environment has changed since the industrial revolution. \u201cThose photos are actually being used as documentary evidence for climate change,\u201d Haslett says.<\/p>\n

The conservation landscape of western countries such as the U.K. and the U.S. and eastern countries like China has been shaped by different cultural forces. In China, religion has played a major role in preserving land over time. Regions and mountains cared for by Buddhist and Taoist monasteries have stayed less developed than areas not under religious influence. \u201cThese traditions also informed centuries of Chinese landscape painting,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cAnd I incorporate some of those iconic images in to the film.\u201d<\/p>\n

But over the last several decades, these traditions have become at odds with the goals of a rapidly industrializing China, a contrast Haslett highlights in her film. Through that contrast, she hopes to grow viewer\u2019s understanding of China and the country\u2019s nuanced relationship to the environment. \u201cThere is very little understanding of what\u2019s going on there,\u201d Haslett argues. \u201cThat\u2019s not to say a lot more can\u2019t be done, but that there are a lot of committed individuals who are working very hard, mostly in obscurity, to preserve natural habitats and biodiversity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Encouraging curiosity <\/strong><\/p>\n

Filming in remote locations in a country where she didn\u2019t speak the language was a challenge for Haslett. Her film crew, which consisted of herself and a translator, Chiu Kang-yen, followed conservationists through mountains and subtropical rainforests, often away from electricity. But keeping equipment charged and dry was nothing compared to the language barrier.<\/p>\n

For interviews, Haslett would discuss her questions with Chiu, a trusted colleague, leaving the interviewing to him while she operated the camera. \u201cI didn\u2019t know exactly what the answers I was getting were,\u201d Haslett reveals. \u201cI would get a synopsis of what had been said, but there were definitely some surprises in the edit room when I got all the detailed translations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Explaining conservation science in a relatable way to her audience has also challenged her as a filmmaker. \u201cMy films about cross-cultural medicine had science in them, but in that case, there are people talking about their health conditions, which is a generally transferrable or understandable set of experiences,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cAll this conservation science is not nearly as accessible to people.\u201d<\/p>\n

But after surmounting obstacles while shooting and then editing, Haslett is closing in on a finished product, one that she hopes will spark insight and honest conversation. \u201cThere\u2019s something about people sitting in a darkened room or cinema, having a shared experience and then talking about it. It\u2019s almost like a church,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cIt really opens up a forum to connect to strangers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Haslett
Haslett (left) interviews Ju Li-Ping, with the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute, and Chinese Culture University Professor Pan Fuh-Jiuun.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For audiences viewing \u201cPushed Up the Mountain,\u201d she encourages people to think about humanity\u2019s environmental impact on a geological time scale. \u201cRhododendrons are eventually going to go extinct and so are we as a species,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cIt\u2019s really an existential question of what do we want to do while on Earth in the finite time that we\u2019re here and to get people to reflect on what small role they might want to take in terms of preserving the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

For Haslett, that could be as small as starting a garden and adapting a willingness to learn not just about the environment but other cultures as well. \u201cWe\u2019re all so interconnected through economics, through the environment, through culture and media for better or worse, so how do we then contend with that in a positive and compassionate way versus an antagonistic and hostile one?\u201d Haslett says. \u201cThat\u2019s why education is so critical. The more that we learn about people that are different from us, the more compassion and empathy we can have.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Haslett finds gratification in sparking conversation with her films, there\u2019s one more personal aspect to making documentaries that drives her forward \u2014 fulfilling her curiosity. \u201cAs a documentarian, your profession is to pay attention to the stories and experiences of others and transform them through a story,\u201d Haslett reflects. \u201cIt gives me a ticket into worlds that I would never really have access to and enables me to learn about the world that I live in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watch a trailer of the film.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Julia Haslett is a documentary filmmaker and an assistant professor in the Department of Communication within the UNC College of Arts & Sciences.<\/em><\/p>\n

Mengqi Jiang is the co-producer of “Pushed up the Mountain” and earned her M.A. from the UNC School of Media and Journalism.<\/em><\/p>\n

By India Mackinson, Endeavors <\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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