Time travel with classic poets

Documentary retraces their journeys to discover what scenes and situations inspired their work, Cheng Yuezhu reports.

Documentary director Li Wenju, in his previous projects, often worked close to nature, traveling to no man's lands deep in the heart of China, witnessing and recording sublime mountainous and forested landscapes with his lens.

"I found that when encountering these scenes, words would often fail me, and I couldn't think of a way to describe them," Li says. "Then once, my team members and I thought of classic poets like Li Bai and Du Fu, wondering if they saw what we are seeing, how they would describe it and what poems they would write."

This spur-of-the-moment question lingered with Li Wenju, and he came up with the idea for a new program, starting to work on it in 2017.

"I thought we could follow the journey of classic poets to see where they went to, what scenery they saw, and what life they led, and explore the association between these experiences and the works they created," he says.