Chinese underwater filmmaker turns her lens on China to show what lives, and lies buried, in the depths of its lakes and seas
- A chance encounter at the North Pole made globetrotting filmmaker Zhou Fang realise rest of world knows more about Chinese marine life than its own people do
- She returned home to film Underwater China, the first China-made documentary filmed in Chinese waters. Now showing on iQiyi, a second season has been approved
Underwater videographer Zhou Fang’s globetrotting exploits to capture the marine world have yielded numerous documentaries over the years. Launched in 2016, Dive the World, a two-season, 25-episode series, follows conservationists around the world as they explore the deep ocean.
A big lover of sharks, Zhou has also made a series of shark-themed documentaries to raise public awareness of the endangered animal.
Three years ago, she put her global sojourns on hold and trained her camera lens closer to home. The results of her work, which took her to more than 20 Chinese provinces and to cities including Hong Kong, can be seen in the recently launched documentary Underwater China. The six-part programme, which is screening exclusively on Chinese online video platform iQiyi, is the first China-made documentary about Chinese waters.
Zhou told the Post that an encounter at the North Pole in 2016 prompted her to make Underwater China. “I was ice-diving there then. A Russian diving instructor asked me whether I knew about Fuxian Lake [in Yunnan province]. I knew the lake but I had never dived there. He said they dived to 100 metres deep in the lake and told me what they saw there.
“As I ventured more overseas, I felt overseas people knew more about China’s underwater world than us. So I wanted to come back home to learn more about the waters of my motherland,” she said.