By Xia Yuanyuan
The winners of the Second CHINAFRICA Short Video Competition were announced on December 8 at award ceremonies held simultaneously in Beijing, Cape Town and Dakar. A short video based on the life and work of an African football coach in China won the grand prize.
"Through the video, I hope to present a real story of people-to-people exchange between China and Africa,” said Xu Wei, one of the creators of the video.
The short video recounts how Pategou Kamgang Francis, a football coach from Cameroon, trains youth in China.
Launched in August this year, the competition is hosted by BEIJING REVIEW under China International Publishing Group (CIPG). It also gets support from the Chinese-African People's Friendship Association. This year, the competition was held in China, Senegal and South Africa.
Under the theme “Working Hand in Hand for a Shared Future”, the competition aims to promote China-Africa friendship and enhance people-to-people understanding. Compared with last year, this year’s competition has higher specifications, a larger scale and more participants and entries. The works were received from 28 countries in the three zones. After preliminary review, online voting and expert evaluation, 19 entries were chosen as winners.
Among the entries, some show how people in China and African countries supported one another during the Covid-19 pandemic; some tell stories of African student volunteers standing together with their Chinese friends to fight the virus; and some talk about how Chinese companies helped residents in Africa prevent and control the epidemic.
Gao Anming, the CIPG vice-president and editor in chief, said that in the new era, China-Africa friendship, especially people-to-people exchanges, needed to be further enhanced. It was timely and important to hold the short video competition and encourage the use of the popular form of media to tell stories about China and African countries and about Chinese and African people.
Gao said the competition could enhance the understanding between the people of China and Africa and the China-Africa friendship. It could also be part of the force pushing forward the development of the Belt and Road Initiative and building an even closer China-Africa community with a shared future.
“Most of the videos tell touching stories about China-Africa joint efforts to fight against the pandemic and praise our traditional friendship between China and Africa,” said Zhou Yong, the counsellor of Cultural Affairs of the Chinese Embassy to South Africa.
He said the vivid and moving video stories had become a positive force helping people overcome the difficulties during the pandemic.
“They also remind us of the importance of healing power of cultural exchange and people-to-people contacts in this time of hardship.”
The short video competition about China-Africa co-operation shows that audiovisual productions are a powerful vector of transmission, popularization of values and rapprochement between peoples through the magic of technologies of information and communication, said Abdoulaye DIOP, the Minister of Culture and Communication of Senegal. “It is precisely through the discovery of other cultures that we become more flexible toward others and that we can understand each other better,” he said.
Zhang Yanqiu, Director of the Africa Communication Research Center at the Communication University of China and one of the judges of the competition, told ChinAfrica that the competition was a way to connect youth in China and Africa.
“This year, I found that many contestants or protagonists of the videos are young people. Young people have played an important role in promoting China-Africa friendly relations. They bring to China African culture, and bring back the goodwill of the Chinese people.”
* Yuanyuan is a journalist with ChinAfrica magazine