In late 2018, Wang and his crew started to follow an eight-member team assigned by the local government in Foshan to help Metog's residents overcome poverty. Between 2016 and 2019, the team led by Xie Guogao, then-deputy Party secretary of Metog, visited all 46 villages in the county to find ways of raising local incomes.
"Xie is an easygoing person with a sense of humor. As someone who grew up in rural Guangdong, he always wears a straw hat and is good at enduring hardships and tough natural environments," Wang says.
As most of the villages were remote, Xie and other officials trekked over 600 kilometers in 30 days to get to the mountainous Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon area, and persuaded 31 households in a village to relocate to a more convenient place.
Local children in the village had to walk long distances from home to take buses to schools in the county. The hiking route is risky and rugged, forcing people to quickly get through a narrow path built along the face of a cliff where gravel falls frequently. There's an old hanging bridge stretching over the turbulent waters of the Yarlung Zangbo River.
But the relocation project had encountered obstacles. Some elderly villagers were reluctant to leave a familiar land where their ancestors lived.
"Some of the villagers had never left their hometown to see the outside world. We can understand their emotional connection to their native land," says Zhang Xu, the chief director of the documentary.
