_{A Marble Travelogue by Sean Wang}

“It went well last time!” Zhao explains why they decided to come together again on the new film. The subject this time round is the “marble route,” a manifestation of contemporary consumer capitalism and globalisation at its most bizarre. Marble is quarried in Greece (with Chinese investment), transported to China, moulded into ornaments for tourists and sent straight back to Greece again as well as to other European countries - and then the souvenirs are sold back to Chinese tourists.

The film was made with “a lot of pieces.” ARTE is one of the supporters. There are French and Greek co-producers and backing from China, Japan and South Korea too. As the director is Chinese, the doc was not eligible for majority support from the Netherlands. “I had to go a long way to get this together,” Zhao says with evident understatement. Zhao is hopeful of Dutch post-production support.

Wang brought the project to Zhao as “a raw idea” and they developed it together. The original title was Epic Of A Stone but this was changed late on to A Marble Travelogue.

“A title is a very difficult thing,” the producer reflects. Right up until the picture was locked, discussions were still being held about what the film should be called. They decided the word epic was too grandiose and that, perhaps, travelogue might fit better given that this was not really the story of an odyssey.

The film is dealing with potentially disturbing subject matter but it still has plenty of humour. “I do think it [the film] has a very serious point,” Zhao says of the economic chain in which so many people are caught up. However, the filmmakers do not disguise the system’s absurdity.

Zhao is a hands-on creative producer who likes to leave her imprint on projects. “I think everybody producing has a different way of fulfilling that role. I am definitely more interested in being part of the creative process,” she says. “I basically feel the producer’s role is to stimulate the creativity [of the director] and maybe also to help the thinking and shaping [of the film] without overruling. At the same time, the producer has to keep things together - the scheduling, budgeting and the editing.” Her main desire is that “the baby is born healthy.”

Zhao has another project in IDFA. She is associate producer on the festival’s opening film, Four Journeys*, directed by Louis Hothothot, the young graphic designer turned filmmaker who moved from China to the Netherlands in 2012.

In spite of Covid and lockdowns, Muyi Film, founded in 2012, has remained very busy. Another of its titles, also screening in IDFA, is Zhao Liang’s I Am So Sorry, which Zhao co-produced and which premiered in Cannes last July.

Yet another new project is a new short fiction The Oxygene Story which has received support from the Netherlands Film Fund’s new Music Mayday-scheme, designed to back work with a musical theme. The director is Abhay Kumar, a recent graduate (MA) at the Netherlands Film Academy. Zhao is working on Aboozar Amini and Witfilm's feature film Ways to Run, supported by Netherlands Film Fund and Eurimages, and is a co-production with Germany, Canada and ZDF.

“I have a bit of a foreign taste,” Zhao says of her slate. She may be based in the Netherlands but, when it comes to her filmmaking, she loves to roam. “I enjoy being a little bit cross-cultural,” she says. “I mostly do, I would not say non-Dutch films, but films that have a non-European perspective.”