"Super foodie" Chen Xiaoqing

The yellow steamed bun just out of the pot is steaming hot, the rice wine is long and amber in color, the Nuodeng ham is made by curing it with Nuodeng well salt for three years, the muscle is red and the fat is white, and the Baiji steamed bun is filled with preserved meat and the aroma is permeated... After the launch of A Bite of China, it not only beat the popular TV series for the first time but also quickly appeared on the hot topic list on Weibo. Even many people who do not watch TV often watch every episode without landing, and "saliva and tears flow together" in the warmth. What's more, it made a splash at this year's Cannes Film Festival. What kind of man is the director of this documentary?

CCTV documentary "Famous Director"

Chen Xiaoqing was born in Lingbi, Anhui Province in 1965. His father was a high school principal. He was gifted with intelligence and was "developed" early by his family. After performing well in the college entrance examination, Chen Xiaoqing was admitted to Beijing Broadcasting Institute to study photography. After finishing graduate school, Chen Xiaoqing joined CCTV, where he began his documentary career.

Chen Xiaoqing entered CCTV, first in the "local station 30 minutes" work, and the local station to establish a wide range of contacts. But at that time, he did not have a film to shoot, endure a year or two before he had the opportunity to touch the camera, a certain area of Hainan more than a dozen counties almost shot all over, can be shot out of the thing and let a second knife to make bad, from then on, Chen Xiaoqing decided to do his director.

Then came the great flood in 1991, when the Huai River basin enclosed the village into many small islands. Chen Xiaoqing was ordered to make a film about the struggle against the floods, called "A Story on an Isolated Island," which was well received after it was shown on CCTV, and The State Council Information Office instructed it to be made into an English version. In the process of making the story of An Island into English, Chen Xiaoqing and her colleagues in Anhui began to plan a new film, Far Away from Home in Beijing.

This is to reflect nanny life, this theme, Chen Xiaoqing had thought about when studying as early as. On a few train trips home, Chen Xiaoqing caught a ride with girls who worked as nannies in Beijing and listened to them speak the Beijing dialect deliberately with the tip of their tongues. She was so amused that she wanted to capture it on camera. Learning to speak the Beijing dialect seems to be just a change in language habits. It can also reflect many psychological, physical, and even life-pursuit changes in nannies. In a certain sense, it can also see the changes in Chinese society.

With the help of the Women's Federation of Wuwei County in Anhui Province, Chen and his film crew tracked down 22 girls who were going to Beijing for the first time to work as nannies. They followed them from the moment they left home until they arrived in Beijing to work as nannies for a family. The crew was improvised on a limited budget, traveling by train and often paying for it themselves. Filming was done in my spare time, and to stay in touch with the nannies, I sometimes went to see them without filming. In 1993, "Home in Beijing" participated in the Sichuan International Television Festival and won the documentary award.

Since then, Chen Xiaoqing in the documentary industry fame, and film contracts. When he made "Forest Song" in 2006, he wanted to make documentaries in a foreign way. "You know how writers in Hollywood sell scripts? To sell a 100-minute script, you have to convince the investors and the director in three minutes, and that's what we did -- you have to move me in three minutes, and then you tell me how you're going to shoot it, where the plot point is, where the climax is, where the setup is." From the beginning, he told his men to make it attractive. As a result, every screenwriter's script has been sent back at least four or five times.

With the script, Chen Xiaoqing asked the directors to determine the shot script, down to the shooting, and strictly formulated the daily shooting process, which day to shoot the animal's paw, and which day to shoot the animal's fur. The details were detailed, but accidents still happened. To take pictures of wild boars in the Changbai Mountains, the film crew threw a thousand kilograms of corn into the area where the wild boars were found and set up a shelter nearby. Soon, the boar appeared. Unexpectedly, a strong wind blew through, and the shelter was blown down, completely exposing people and camera equipment to the boar. The boar saw this and ran away.

Before filming, he hired two groups of senior foreign producers, directors, and cinematographers to train his staff on how to deal with fierce animals. In the end, they included the rare wildlife footage in the 11-episode documentary with a ratio of 60:1, which caused a great response abroad.

Life's 'Super foodie'

Chen Xiaoqing has won many international and domestic TV awards. He is a well-known documentary filmmaker, but few people know that he is also a food columnist. As early as 10 years ago, he has been a guest on seven or eight TV food programs and loves to taste and study food. In addition to countless food selfies, Ms. Chen's phone contains data on hundreds of restaurants in Beijing and across China, including their names, addresses, phone numbers, and even a list of their signature dishes. He has a surprising "food map".

Chen Xiaoqing, nicknamed "Sweep street Mouth", searches the streets and alleys of Beijing, tries to find a chance to taste any restaurant that looks good, and writes down the name and address of the restaurant. Chen Xiaoqing said that Liang Shiqiu's words led him to have a keen interest in Beijing snacks, he even found a few Liang Shiqiu in the text describing snacks.

At that time, Chen Xiaoqing often went to Qingfeng, Hugo Temple, and Longfu Temple snack shops in Xidan. The ordinary food, such as enema, fried tripe, fried liver, and stewed pork, was better than each other. The most amazing thing is that a small shop in Nanchi Zi Nankou, in addition to the bag burning skin, thin bottom, crisp stuffing incense, and doornail meat pie is also done well. And a special treat: fried tofu soup. At first, he couldn't get used to it, but then he became addicted to it. Fried tofu is placed in a row of bowls. The chef uses a spoon to put the tofu into the clear soup with dried shrimp skin and lightly heat it a few times. Then pour it back into the bowl, and then use a small iron spoon to add the bean curd juice, sesame paste, chives flowers, and scallion coriander in turn. In the morning light of Beijing in the middle of winter, sitting under the red wall of the root of the imperial city, drinking such a bowl, the aroma blurred down the throat, very comfortable.

Chen Xiaoqing's food column is scattered in many magazines and newspapers. He is keen on civilian food, so many of his stories are about street food, such as snail noodles, beef noodles, and boiled gravy, which all shine brightly in his pen. One description of luosifen, for example, reads: "The noodles were boiled and filled to the brim with fried beancurd. Beneath the crisp pieces of beancurd lay a thick layer of finely sliced agaric and acid bamboo shoots, which are set off by plump peanuts. Red pink soup lined with white rice flour, and lettuce base. First take a sip of the soup, although there is no snail meat, the umami taste must be the product of repeated close contact between snail and pig bones in the soup pot."

Sometimes, even if invited to some high-class restaurants to eat, Chen Xiaoqing will not write in the column, no matter how good a friend is cook there, will not write. Not afraid of being perceived as unfair, he insists on one idea about food: good food doesn't have to cost a lot of money.

Chen Xiaoqing's "foodie" ability, as a good friend of Zhejiang Satellite TV documentary senior editor Xia Yanping, experienced many times. When he is in Beijing to eat worry, as long as Chen Xiaoqing sends a short message, the other side will take the trouble to send a dozen short messages to recommend, and his "living map" still radiates the whole country. Chen Xiaoqing never recommends restaurant food, mostly roadside stalls and private dishes. "When he first discovered Jiangnan Post, Hangzhou people did not know about it." "Xia said.