US film producer captures China's path of growth

American documentary producer Bill Einreinhofer's love of film began early while in high school, and he admits that his incredible career spanning five decades capturing life through a lens has given him a charmed existence, and one where he still enjoys the art of making documentaries and has been fortunate enough to travel the world and meet people from a variety of cultures, including China.

Einreinhofer, 74, from Rutherford, New Jersey began his career in the late 1970s after graduating with a history degree from Saint Peter's University in New Jersey in 1974 and earning a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is chair emeritus of the Broadcast Journalism department at the New York Film Academy and heads a company called Paradox Communications. He has also taught students in Asia.

The three-time Emmy Award-winning television and documentary filmmaker joined WNET as a production assistant in October 1976. He produced his first WNET documentary in the spring of 1977. He has developed and produced programming and news for PBS, CBS, ABC, Discovery and HBO. His documentary films on China run the gamut, delighting audiences with moments and unique storytelling about history, people, places and moments.

In an exclusive interview with China Daily in New York, the filmmaker shared his approach to his work and the lessons he's learned as an American doing work in and about China for over 30 years.

"You know, one of the great challenges in working on stories about China is you have 5,000 years of history," he says. "And even in a documentary, you only have a limited amount of time. So, it's trying to grant one particular area, one particular person, one particular era, to explore."

His work on China taught him how to work across cultures, a valuable lesson that he says anyone can embrace at any level.

"Frankly, I think the best American ambassadors to China are those Americans who go and visit China," he said. "And the best Chinese diplomats, when it comes to the United States, are Chinese visitors who come to the United States, who meet Americans and can quickly dispel a lot of the strange, false stories they may have heard."

His enormous body of work means that he has one of the largest privately held libraries of footage about China in North America, he said.

Looking back to the start, he explained that in the early 1990s, he decided to do a program about the Chinese space program. He got lucky as it was "fresh territory" and not a topic that was widely known by American audiences at the time. But it was challenging because he didn't know anybody in China.

Fortunately, he had an intern, a postgraduate student from New York University's School of Journalism who was on sabbatical, but was a reporter for CCTV. Einreinhofer was able to use the student's contacts, go to China, get the story, come back and make the film and put it on public TV. He added that he likes to ind hidden stories that are not in the news, or that people don't know about what it is like to live in China.

He first visited Beijing in 1989 to work on Innovation, the long-running PBS science, health and technology series that he conceived and executive produced.

After that shoot, he recalls thinking that "at that point, I thought, 'well, okay, that's it when it comes to China.' But what I discovered was that, because I worked there, people would come to me, clients would come to me and they said 'look, we need something done in China. You've been there before, we're going to send you.'"

Today, his long list of documentary films includes China Now: To Get Rich Is Glorious; So Very Far From Home; The Hidden China; Shanghai 1937: Where World War II Began; Unsettled History: America, China and the Doolittle Tokyo Raid; Valor and Memory and others.