Yan Feng's Road to Directing

During 1993, Yan Feng got to know this documentary as an ordinary audience at Yamagata Film Festival, from which he got to know Ogawa Shinsuke's works and films. Later, she translated The Harvest Movie: The World of Ogawa Shinsuke into Chinese and published it by Liu Yuan Publishing House. Meanwhile, she started her documentary practice. 1994, Yan Feng visited and photographed the Three Gorges Reservoir for the first time. 1997, she finished her first feature film "Dream of the Yangtze River" and was selected as the Asian New Wave Unit, which made her come to Yamagata as an author. In 2002, Yan Feng once again returned to the village she photographed on the edge of the Yangtze River. Those characters and changes in life deeply touched her. This time, she focused on four women. Five years later, Yan Feng edited the story of one of the women into a movie "Ice Love", so she returned to Yamagata again and won the Ogawa Shinsuke Prize of the Asian New Wave Unit. The film also won the grand prize of Punto De Vista International Documentary Film Festival in 2008 and the Excellence Award of the 4th China Documentary Exchange Week. Also in 2007, Yan Feng paid a return visit to her characters, and she was preparing her next project-Women by the Yangtze River, which will spend ten years weaving the stories of four women under the background of Three Gorges immigrants, showing the changes of ordinary life and the ideals and practical difficulties contained therein.