The documentary filmmakers' struggle in shanghai (reprint from:Shanghai Daily)

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In 2004, Zhu was assigned by his media company employer to come up with documentary ideas about protecting Shanghai 's vanishing culture. He found a small shop at No. 10 Qingguan Road that was about to be demolished, and made a film featuring the daily life of the shop owner and his neighbors, preserving the now-vanished buildings and lifestyle.

Zhu's second documentary, "Summer of No. 97," was a similar film on a different street. The 60-minute documentary in two parts aired last October on the Shanghai Documentary Channel, receiving middle-range ratings, good for a beginner.Zhu is optimistic. "As long as my movies are good, I'm not worried about funding." But he admits it would be almost impossible to survive if he were not also making commercial videos,

"To survive, yes, but just enough for the basic necessities," he says.

The question is where do we see these films On TV In the cinema Overseas Documentary film distributor Zheng is pessimistic.

"In China, very few documentaries can make their way into the cinema, since even many fiction films don't get shown. Hence, 99 percent of documentaries are sold to television stations at very low prices," she says.

Chinese films are frequently said to find favor overseas and many filmmakers are said to try to appeal to foreign viewers.

But Zheng says that's on a case-by-case basis, "so it's meaningless to try to accommodate foreign tastes. In my opinion, the target audience of Chinese documentary films must be Chinese."

Zheng's statement is supported by the ratings of the 2006 programs of the STV Documentary Channel.

The highest rating was only 1.83 percent - and that was for the Discovery Channel. If the world's top-quality documentaries cannot interest audiences, how can we find fault with Chinese documentary makers

Zheng also points out the lack of qualified film producers, especially in documentary films. Most Chinese documentary filmmakers are themselves the producer, director, scriptwriter, recorder, and editor - all in one, for lack of funding.

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