August 12, World Elephant Day, has come and gone. On this day, you might have remembered that a year ago, a herd of rogue elephants seized the headlines with their journey to the north. While such a trumpeting parade did attract plenty of attention worldwide, we still don’t seem to understand much about the actual subject of the news—the Asian elephant.

Film director Chen Yizhi (Olivia Chen) is about to change that. Chen has placed wildlife front and center in various works throughout her 10-year career in documentary filmmaking. As of recently, she has tracked the unusual pilgrimage of these colossal creatures up north and back home to the south in the documentary March of the Elephants, co-produced by China Review Studio and Tencent SSV (Sustainable Social Value Division). For this episode of Story FM, we get to talk with Chen about her experience.

When it comes to wildlife documentaries, the average Chinese viewer is sure to recall Zhao Zhongxiang and his voice-over work on the CCTV nature show Animal World, bringing to national TV screens the lions and leopards of the African savannah. However, China itself has vast and rich wildlife populations across its varied geographic landscapes. From deserts to grasslands, basins, tropical rainforests and wetlands, what kind of wild creatures live alongside humankind in this country?

Guided by this curiosity and in her capacity as a film director, Chen set out to seek her own answer to this question from behind her camera lens. Features in her portfolio include red-crowned cranes, finless porpoises, Chinese alligators, wild pangolins, and the skywalker hoolock gibbons, just to name a few species. Her documentary A Love Song to the Skyline has won a series of well-known international awards and nominations such as Best Film at the International Wildlife Film Festival (IWFF).

Subsequently, Chen travelled to Yunnan, where she met the Asian elephants in the summer of 2021. This is what happened.

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Hide-and-Seek

My name is Chen Yizhi, and I am a director of wildlife documentaries. My first close encounter with Asian elephants took place at a nature reserve in Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, where I was initially covering an assignment involving insects. At the time, there were two additional wild family herds migrating back home to the southwest after a fairly mysterious journey. I happened to meet one of these herds, composed of 15 elephants that I got to see for the first time through the footage taken by a local person’s drone.

Huge as they are, the elephants on the drone monitor resembled a herd of pigs. They could be seen tentatively surrounding man-made shacks for a round of exploration with their trunks, as if taking part in a treasure hunt—drinking water from buckets, hooking items from under some iron shed and more. All of a sudden, I felt like I had entered a playful paradise where humans and elephants played a joint game of hide-and-seek.