What we’re about
Behind the Creation In August of 2013, the current leader of Beijing NO.4 Congenital Heart Disease Research Team got a chance to work with China Central Television in deep Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture of Ganan to capture the wild beauty of China. The Tibetan people’s unique lifestyle on prairie has deeply imprinted on Vivian’s mind ever since. Vivian observed that it’s extremely inconvenient of the herdsmen to travel freely. To graze the sheep, Tibetan needs to go to the remotest area of the prairie; therefore they always live quite a distance from the local town. Vivian remember during her stay, the entire CCTV cast needed to drive for three to four hours from the hotel in town to the prairie. Because every family on prairie has a large amount of sheep, all of the families live far from each other to avoid disturbance. It took the cast forty minutes to reach the next family. Tibetan people normally travel on horses, therefore water in bottles and snacks were rare to them. They were delighted when the cast brought these to them. Tibetans generally believe in Tibetan Buddhism, and Tibetans’ way of life in Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture is rather barbarous. Vivian found, through a conversation with teacher GONGBA, that Tibetans are not highly aware of diseases due to their environmental limitations. They didn’t know the symptoms of illness, and they also were not aware of the idea of hospital. This resulted in abundant of diseases in Tibetan area, and most of these diseases are of high concern from the society. The team leader also found that congenital heart disease’s degree of social concern was the highest above all. Consequently Vivian’s interest was aroused on this subject, and she started to connect this hazardous disease to the Chinese society. After Vivian came back to the school, she talked to of her friends and realized that some of her friends had a certain degree of knowledge and concern for this disease. Nicole, Steven and Kirsten had been to Tibet and had encountered patients who suffered dearly from this disease as well. After endless discussions, Beijing NO.4 International Campus Tibetans Congenial Heart Disease research team was established. The team wishes to gain attention for this issue by creating a film and it was recognized that every team member had a strong suit to contribute to this project. Nicole, Steven, Vivian, and Kirsten first got together and Shirley from Beijing Zhongjia School was later recruited. After thorough consideration, members decided to create a documentary film with a topic of “Congenital Heart Disease”. In the process of editing the documentary, there were some very appealing scenes, such as the face -up (kids eat bananas picture, children crying picture), close-up (Tibetan incense, Buddhist scriptures player, some medical equipment and banners), children scenes of joy, nurses and parents to comfort children's pictures etc. We picked our favorite songs to be the background music and we met for a whole week working on the commentary and our second stage’s goal. To us, it was painful to watch the little children suffer dearly as well as joyful seeing the children recovering from the trauma. Our first stage of project is reaching an end, and all of us realized how lucky we are to live in a big city with good health and advanced hospitals. The children’s sincere face will forever imprint on our mind. This is just a start of our immense project. We’ve got something huge planned ahead of us.