Documentaries Go Vertical: This is Life, a Social-Media Portrait of China

In China, over half of all internet-users watch vertical dramas: that is an audience of over 576 million people. Sun Hong’s Yānhuǒ Rénjiān (This Is Life, 2020) is the first and, to my knowledge, only vertical documentary that has received a theatrical release in the country. A portrait of ordinary Chinese life stitched together from 887 social media clips, it premiered at the Pingyao International Film Festival in 2020 and went on to win that year’s Best Innovative Documentary Film at the China Academy Awards of Documentary Film. By sourcing its footage directly from the internet, it departs from works that treat digital life as subject – like Douglas Rushkoff and Frank Koughan’s series Generation Like  (2014) or feature films like Arthur Jones’ Feels Good Man (2020) – as well as from short-form documentaries on The New York Times or BBC Vertical that use traditional production methods while shooting in portrait mode. This Is Life technically is the internet: it sources its material and editing techniques from the web and thereby both resembles and extends it.

John Grierson first coined the term documentary filmmaking in the early 1920s as the “arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings… of natural material.”¹ His definition insists upon a separation between the real world and the filmmaker’s lens: the documentarian does not alter the material; they observe it. However much of a myth that may be in practice, at the time of the shoot the camera is ostensibly silent; while the filmmaker might impose themselves upon the material before and after – when choosing a camera, for instance, or while piecing dailies together in the editing room – their film remains a scan of the real world. Successive transformations in the documentary tradition (from Soviet-era documentary expressionism in the 1920s to British Documentary, Free Cinema, observational filmmaking, and the archival self-referential documentary of the ‘70s and ‘80s²) might suggest substantive changes, but all retain the camera as an observer. As an audience, we are watching the filmmaker watch what is happening before them.

By turning the camera around, vertical documentaries break with that tradition. Watch This is Life and you will notice how different it feels. In a move that elides the camera as a middleman, the film opens with a screen-recording of Kuaishou’s homepage, the platform from where the clips were sourced, which takes the audience directly into the app’s social media feed. In each clip, people film themselves and speak to us directly. Social media then draws us further in. Users solicit a reaction from their audience and there is a kind of “look at me”, “can-you-believe-it” gawkiness on display. A man records his grandma doing his hair with a comb the size of a scythe. A truck driver and his wife elevate their breakfasts, lunches, and dinners into great dramas by taking out their wok roadside and tossing in the ingredients they’ve scavenged from rest stops and roadside stands. There are shopping hauls, drone shows, filtered clips, karaoke sessions on bullet trains, and other ornaments of China’s technological life, gaudily displayed. 

Each of these clips are interesting, if only ambiently so, and while audiences might not always be entertained, they are still primed to care about what is going on. That’s not necessarily a conscious choice either. When users record their clips, they are simultaneously watching themselves on their phones – at once actor, director, and audience. As viewers, we do not so much identify with them as we watch the clips from their same physical position. If we feel that the clips reach us with more immediacy, it is because they technically do.

What audiences lack, however, is a way of channeling their parasocial connection with the user into a more meaningful form of engagement (i.e., by clicking into the user’s profile, watching their other videos, getting a more thorough sense of who they are). It is ultimately the director’s job to convert the audience’s short bursts of attention into a more extended form of watching, to make this a film, not just a reproduction of the Kuaishou experience. But This Is Life cannot fall back on traditional storytelling or characterisation. As Sun points out, there is not enough material to “provide a complete portrait of a single person… or show what is behind any single moment in the short videos.”³ 

Her team’s alternative is to group the clips by theme. A video of a man who watches his lunch get eaten by alpacas becomes “about” food. One set in a train station on Chinese New Years’ Eve becomes “about” hometowns. This straightforward approach puts forth a vision of life that resides within the lower echelons of Maslow’s hierarchy: we are shown what people wear, what they eat, where they live, and how they migrate. Intertitles introduce each of these four themes; otherwise, the clips proceed back to back. By grouping users within categories, This Is Life turns each theme into these individuals’ most salient trait, which masks the way Sun’s team pre-selected for a specific type of demographic. As she says:

“Users on Kuaishou have certain characteristics: they tend to live in county towns or third and fourth-tier cities… Kuaishou users have also retained the quality of using the platform to record their own lives, whereas on Douyin (China’s TikTok), the content is more entertainment-focused… Kuaishou videos’ raw and unpolished nature are more authentic. We felt that Kuaishou’s community of users aligned more with our intentions for making this film.”

Read some of the film’s reviews, however, and you will notice that people buy into the users’ “ordinariness” not as a condition imposed upon them by their environment but as each person’s natural trait. Beijing Review, for instance, praised how the film “captures the essence of individuals in an era of rapid change,” and “presents their authentic life experience.”⁴ Negative reviews on the app Douban take issue with the film precisely because they think the people are too ordinary.

Neither camp goes into what “ordinary” means. It’s a paradoxical word: when we really think someone is ordinary, we’d just refer to them as ‘people’. Calling out ordinariness implies that there is a reason we or others would think otherwise.  Generally, we do not draw those distinctions when meeting new people. There’s always a reason why we want to meet this person over that person. Someone possesses our attention to the exclusion of another. Only when we see humanity from a birds’-eye view does the concept of the “ordinary” become relevant. When one scrolls on Kuaishou, for instance, the shortness of those clips and the speed at which we scroll,  make us sensitive to repeating patterns across the broad spread of disparate content, which has been pre-selected and pre-filtered for our consumption. The process is by definition exclusionary and particularizing. 

A frame from the section, “What they Eat.”

Jia Zhangke gets closer to the real merits of the film when he says, “these short videos would have been lost to history had it not been for an author to present them to the world.”⁵ The internet remains a porous, open-access, data-saturated arena (Google has called it “an ever-growing library with billions of books and no central filing system”).⁶ URLs create digital addresses for otherwise disconnected pages but over a quarter of links created since 2013 do not work,⁷ in part because the pages themselves have been archived – Paramount Global, for instance, shut down its MTV news and Country Music Television websites in 2024 – and also because when companies edit their HTML lettering they sever those links from their servers.⁸

To search for anything online is to therefore start from an imperfect base. Automated bots then comb through a pre-built and continuously refreshed internet index to retrieve the information, but are beholden to the algorithms that rank those sources by relevance. Sun and other digital archivists are able to point out where the clips are from and where there might be a lacuna in the archives, meaning that films like This is Life have the stronger claim to delivering the full 30,000-foot view so long as they “confine… (themselves) to addressing factual questions,” as Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes in the New York Review of Books in an article on data-based reporting.⁹ “(The approach) can fall into error if it starts offering inductive judgments based on the data that is available without being sufficiently mindful of what data may be missing.”¹⁰

Ian Bell and Alex Megaro’s team parsed through one-thousand hours of news broadcast and VCR footage to make WTO/99 (2025), a chronicle of the demonstrations against Seattle’s World Trade Organization ministerial.¹¹ Because the protests lasted for four days, the drama maps onto a comprehensible chronology. Geeta Gandbhir’s Perfect Neighbor (2025), about Florida’s “stand your ground” laws, also works for this reason. Its police body-cam footage, handheld phone shots, and security tapes capture one event from multiple angles and allow us to experience a reality with a clear beginning and end.

One could imagine a similar movie being made today about the anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis. Newsrooms shutter, and one often hears how broadcasters are denied entry into warzones. But everyone has a phone. The central pursuit of Open Source Journalism – that of “finding publicly accessible data on an incident, verifying the authenticity of the data, using that data to confirm the temporal and spatial dimensions of the incident, and cross-referencing the data with other digital records,” to quote Ahmad again – can offer a reprieve to underfunded newsrooms still trying to do investigative work.¹²

Kuaishou users featured in This Is Life

To craft This Is Life, Sun’s team spent a year going through 50,000 Kuaishou videos. Absent a hermetic account of specific events, others can make use of the film as a kind of data set. For instance: in China, films go through multiple rounds of review to acquire a Public Screening Permit to determine if they comply with the PRC’s “core socialist values.” The criteria is purposefully vague; censors are able to “respond to the … ‘perceived danger of the day’” this way so that films which have been approved might be subject to scrutiny again should new cultural anxieties arise.¹³ It bears noting that This Is Life received its theatrical release four years after it premiered in 2020; on account of its structure alone, which sets clips in a listicle, one can see how the film equalizes all those who appear in it, thus handing the party a useful visual aid to buttress its talking points about national unity. But what if a Western audience were to see it? Might This Is Life become a film about the poverty of communism, its cheap aesthetics, or the atomization of the working class?

Ultimately, the film’s ambiguity has a salutary effect upon China’s cultural legitimacy, since it creates the appearance that the government is willing, from time to time, to engage with difficult subjects. Editing politically sensitive films rather than banning them outright is a quieter form of censorship, and avoids feeding a samizdat culture with forbidden fruit. But while one does not need to ask why filmmakers need government funding, increasingly, as vertical films take on a central role in China’s international soft power strategy, I find myself asking the question in reverse. 

At the end of 2025, China launched a “content renewal plan” to support “quality documentaries and animations” and “outstanding micro and short series to be broadcast on TV”. It takes a $7 billion industry – one which outperformed the traditional box office in 2024 – and brings it to the U.S.¹⁴ Around the same time, the Independent Television Service (ITVS) started its own vertical video fund to support six documentary filmmakers with up to $36,000 each to produce 12 videos for Independent Lens and PBS’s social media platforms.¹⁵ Other institutions relay that beacon, including the Lenfest Institute of Journalism which will contribute $1 million to local newsrooms that collaborate with content creators, Poynter and Media Wise which have partnered to provide $300,000 to teenagers making trusted short form videos, and News Creator Corps, which will be offering $5,000 stipends to creators at large.¹⁶

Most of these programs aren’t looking for established brands. As ITVS founding executive producer Lois Vossen explains, the point is to find “people who are in it, who can grow with us and we can grow with them.”¹⁷ Funding bodies pay to bring the content creators’ brand identity under their remit so that they improve their own discoverability by building out the creators’ platforms. ITVS may indeed produce some “incredibly human stories” while holding fast to their insistence on “creat(ing) something for the good of the public … aside from commercial interest”. But those results would be salutary. It’s not that funders do not care about the content that they’re making but that considerations about the audience take priority. In a 2016 Documentary Magazine roundtable Q&A with short-film directors, Sheena M. Joyce, who commissioned shorts for ESPN and SundanceNow Doc Club, touted them as “more palatable, bite-sized way(s) to get (a) message or (the) craft across.”¹⁸ Vossen again justifies the ITVS program on the grounds that “We don’t want to lose tens of millions of people who aren’t watching feature documentaries.”¹⁹ Were real editorial freedom to exist, one would first make the content and then find its audience. Audiences can only want what they are shown, and outlets which claim to have their hands tied by audience preference for short-form video should remember they are also architects of their viewers’ desires. Certainly it has never been easy to build up an audience, but brands which follow viewers into the short-form arena have not necessarily tried. By releasing more short-form videos, they chip away at the earth underneath their own feet. The idea that viewers who do discover ITVS on TikTok will switch over to long-form documentaries may also be naive.

It is the creators who ultimately profit, and in more ways than one. When the Shanghai International Film Festival inaugurated its “Vertical Screen” category in 2024, it wanted to help younger filmmakers get their foot in the traditional studio door²⁰ and ITVS provides mentorship, workshops, and editorial support alongside funding for its grantees. In what otherwise remains a rather atomized content-creating space, such opportunities connect early filmmakers to a community of mentors. One wonders why these mentors do not just seek out and support filmmakers already working in long-form, but this is a compromise between creative vision and audience platform that one can understand. Perhaps, after all is done, the relationships will endure. Therein, for the creators, lies a valuable, career-launching on-ramp.

Endnotes