Yunnan

A full-length documentary set on the frontiers of China and Southeast Asia that offers an intimate, layered perspective of one of the region's most marginalized and misunderstood ethnic groups.

Cocooned inside her home in the mountains of southwest China in early 2020, a visual artist raised 1,000 silkworms and created a series of videos, installations and silk embroidery while undertaking her own process of metamorphosis.

A husband and wife team harvest walnuts and rare mushrooms to sell at a weekly market at the foot of a Buddhist monastery, evoking a simple, yet demanding, way of living.

While living with mushroom hunters, a conceptual artist collects and documents rare endemic species of fungi in the mountains of southwest China. Many have never been photographed by outsiders.

A conceptual artist and filmmaker briefly lives with a husband and wife team of mushroom hunters and finds spiritual nourishment and symbiosis with the nature world within the physical toil.

Deep in the forests of Jizu Shan, a man convicted of illegal logging lives in isolation and raises bees that produce honey like nowhere else on earth.

An hypnotic visual collage of rare mycelia set to natural (and unnatural) soundscapes.

When public gatherings resume in China, an artist exhibits two years of silkworm cocoon installations, mushroom spore prints and silk embroideries and finds herself humbled by the relevance of her work.

The first episode examines the rapid cultural transformations occurring within Yunnan's ethnic Bai and Yi communities where generations of farmers weigh the benefits of tradition against modern agronomics.

Episode 3 of the ethnographic docuseries about three generations of Dai artisans who have found creative means to preserve Hinayana Buddhist traditions and community identity.

The fourth episode is set in Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in the northwest of Yunnan—once known as the independent kingdom of Kham—where herders and famers are leaving their land for the cities.

The fifth episode rakes places near Yunnan's border with Myanmar (Burma) where efforts to conserve and re-wild the ancestral lands of ethnic Lisu require hunters and famers to seek alternative means of survival.

The second episode travels to Bangdong in southwest Yunnan where some of the oldest and most revered tea trees grow next sacred groves where villagers continue to pray to the old spirits.