Film bridges gap between Chinese and Argentines

Have you ever seen an Argentine supermarket on the streets in China? If the answer is no, you may be surprised to know that in Argentina, a Latin American country thousands of miles away from China, Chinese supermarkets abound.

There are about 11,000 supermarkets in Argentina belonging to Chinese families and nine million out of the country's total population of 43 million shop there daily, Diego Ramiro Guelar, Argentine ambassador to China, said in an interview with China Daily website.

Now you might be wondering why are there so many Chinese supermarkets in Argentina? When did those Chinese emigrate there? Which part of China are those immigrants originally from? Above all, how did those immigrants feel in the new country?

From Here to China, an Argentine drama comedy directed by Federico Marcello, may help satisfy your curiosity and offer answers to your questions through quite an atypical way.

Inspired by his observation that most of Chinese immigrants in Argentina are engaged in the retail trade, Marcello interviewed nearly 400 Chinese supermarket owners before he made up his mind to tell a story about the Chinese community, a reticent ethnic group that is often ignored or even misunderstood in his country.

However, instead of directly bringing those Chinese immigrants into focus in his film, the director blazed a trail by telling a story of an Argentine man Facundo who travelled to Xiamen, East China's Fujian province, with his friend and opened the first-ever Argentine supermarket there.

The duo's act is part of Facundo's revenge for his father's business failure back in the 1990s when the arrival of a slew of Chinese supermarkets in Argentina elbowed many local ones out of business and the one owned by Facundo's father was unfortunately one of them.

To the director's mind, a mockumentary portraying two Argentines' struggle to establish a business in an utterly different cultural milieu on the other end of the world can help put his countrymen into the shoes of their Chinese neighbors whose stores dot the neighborhood.

The indie production, made on a tight budget of $80,000, nearly emptied the director's pocket. But to ensure authenticity, the team did not simply opt for the China Town in Argentine as the setting for the film; instead, they packed up some Argentinian delicacies such as mate tea and dulce de leche (caramel), and then embarked on an eastward journey to China's Fujian province, where nearly 85 percent of the first-generation Chinese immigrants originally hail from.

To get by on the tight budget, the film also stars the director himself and his friend Pablo Zapata, producer of the film. Plus, many of Marcello's family members acted in the film and his house was used as the filming location.

Despite a script test and some preparations, everything seemed topsy-turvy when the team first arrived in Xiamen. Their efforts of running an Argentine supermarket were beset by a series of problems – language barriers, falling behind the shooting schedule, low supermarket patronage and more.