A 2008 documentary on the Kucong people, an ethnic subgroup of China's Lahu ethnic group, The Sixth Resettlement, starts with a scene in which a TV is playing a 50-year-old documentary at a village market. People in the market are crowded around the small screen, some shouting excitedly when they recognize a family member or themselves.

"That man is my grandpa," said a middle-aged woman in the movie, suddenly standing up from the seated audience. Her pride soon turned into embarrassment when she realized that the Kucong people half a century ago were practically naked except for leaves or fur around their waists.

Without the knowledge necessary to live an agricultural life, the Kucong people traveled into the deep forests on the Ailao Mountain along China's border with Viet Nam. They collected wild fruits and hunted animals. They rubbed bamboo sticks to make fire.

Only the bravest Kucong people wore old clothes that they bartered from other ethnic groups living nearby. They hid in the grass by a path and waited for a passerby to trade their own clothes for fur or wild herbs the Kucong laid on the ground. Most Kucong people were too afraid to talk with any outsiders.

Tan Leshan's 96-year-old father planned the old documentary while Tan himself planned the new one. "Back in the 1950s, my father wrote a letter to the Ministry of Culture suggesting using video to record the traditional lifestyles of ethnic groups before they disappeared," said Tan, a professor of visual anthropology at Yunnan University.

His father's letter attracted attention from China's state leaders and was quickly approved. The filming of this new genre of documentaries in China, called "records of ethnic groups," lasted from 1957 to 1965 and became part of the country's unprecedented nationwide survey of ethnic minorities. But at that time China could not produce movie cameras or film. The government guaranteed cameras and film to shoot the documentaries by cutting down on fictional movies being made. Of the 15 documentaries produced, Tan's father participated in seven, which are about six ethnic groups in Yunnan.

These old documentaries turned into smash hits when they were screened in Europe in the 1990s, giving a boost to Yunnan University's East Asia Institute of Visual Anthropology, where Tan is the vice director. In 1999, the institute received funding from Volkswagen to start training programs for young Chinese visual anthropologists in partnership with German institutions. Tan wished to shoot new documentaries on people observed by his father, as a salute to China's first generation of documentary makers on ethnic minorities. The Sixth Resettlement is the second in the works.

"My father is pleased to hear about my plan to put the people he studied in the lens again. He thinks this is a good family tradition," Tan said. He said that in his childhood, he was intrigued by bows and arrows collected by his father from ethnic minorities and looked forward to seeing how they lived with his own eyes.

The 78-year-old Yang Guanghai was the cameraman on the earlier Kucong people documentary. He said his crew from a state-owned film studio was asked by their leaders to record the production methods, customs and social structure of the Kucong people's communities. Over the course of a year's shooting, Yang's crew had to overcome harsh living conditions in primitive forests. Shooting was suspended for three months after Yang caught malaria and was sent back to Beijing for treatment.

"Back then, we attached the utmost importance to our work. We would rather die at our posts than disappoint our leaders and the audience," said Yang, who participated in the filming of six documentaries on ethnic minorities.

A new life

Ouyang Bin, Director and cameraman of The Sixth Resettlement, said he was unsure whether he could find the offspring of the people in the old documentary before shooting the film. The Kucong people number about 40,000 and they move frequently in the mountains at an average altitude of 1,800 meters. But it didn't take Ouyang long to find the protagonist for his documentary, Bai Yaomei.

"In a chat after watching our old documentary, Bai told me that if she was lucky, her family could move into a new village at the foot of a mountain under a government-subsidized resettlement program," said Ouyang. "We thought the resettlement process might turn into something interesting."

Bai's 96-year-old mother, Ma Ermei, said in the new documentary that the government's resettlement programs for the Kucong people failed five times after the old film was shot in 1958. People in Bai's village moved back to the primitive forests each time after the government moved them into a new government-built village because most of them lacked skills necessary to live out of their mountain homes.

The situation changed in the 1990s as the Kucong people voluntarily moved out of the forests to become farmers. Like other families in the village, Bai raised rice for food and cardamom for sale. Collecting wild herbs from steep mountain slopes like her ancestors now only accounts for a small part of Bai's family income. Almost every family in Bai's village of around 130 households has a small hydropower-generated TV set from which they see the outside world.

The documentary's main story follows Bai as she tries to be among the first batch of families moving into the new village, even by taking out loans with 40 percent interest rates to pay for the new housing. Compared to her old mountain village, which was a four-hour walk from the nearest road, the new village is right next to a road and close to a market. The house is equipped with electricity and running water.

Bai Zhengming, Bai's son-in-law, is part of a new generation of Kucong people who readily accept a modern life at the cost of losing old mountain survival skills. Although the young father still taught his sons how to build a field mouse trap with tree branches, a living skill passed down for generations, he insisted on sending his elder son to school. He told his mother-in-law that only by learning to read could his son avoid being cheated in payment. Bai said none of her four children knows as many mountain herbs as she does.

Fifty years ago, the Kucong people lived in an egalitarian society without any private property. In the 2008 documentary, Bai's fellow villagers are shown stealing half of her family's cardamom harvest from the field. And the Kucong people's economy ever felt the effects of the global financial crisis, which triggered a slump in cardamom prices at the village market and disrupted her plan to pay off her debts by the end of the year.

"I try to show my audience that social evolution and changes are never easy for individuals involved," said Ouyang, who spent five months shooting the documentary. One scene shot while Bai was selling a piece of wild herb she dug from the mountains at a market, showed that she was too shy to bargain with the buyer. In the end, she was paid only 20 yuan ($2.90) rather than the several hundred yuan true value of the herb. The audience can plainly see the sadness and helplessness on Bai's face.

Along with another 59 families, Bai's family moved into their new houses at the end of the 55-minute documentary. The local government called their new town "Sixth Resettlement Village."

"The documentary is about the integration of an old life into a modern one. I only record people's behavior in this process, and won't make a judgment on which is better," said Ouyang.