Volunteers bring joy to blind moviegoers’ lives

Every Saturday Wang Fokun travels 40 minutes to watch a movie with friends. Wang, 64, lost his sight in his early 50s after experiencing a high degree of myopia, but in the past two years a “talking film” club has enabled him to regain his love for cinema.

The club is in Kunming, Yunnan province, where volunteers give vivid narrations to an audience comprising blind and partially sighted cinemagoers.

“I listened to a film for the first time in the summer of 2019, and it was great,” said Wang, who watches films each week in Yunfang Museum’s theatre in Kunming. “I could fully understand the movie despite being blind. The volunteers do a great job.”

Dozens of people attend the Saturday screenings organised by Xin Deng Theatre, a group of volunteers who present films to visually impaired audiences. A narrator describes what is happening on screen, including facial expressions, unspoken gestures, the setting and costumes.

The volunteers relay to the audience visual clues that would otherwise be missed, such as a sudden change of scenery from falling leaves to snow to mark the passing of time.

One volunteer, who wanted to be named only as Yifan, has narrated more than 20 movies, doing so for the first time to an audience of more than 80 in November 2019. That afternoon Yifan was nervous as he described a scene from the movie Wo Bu Shi Wang Mao to a roomful of people as the movie projector whirred away. Yifan said the audience members immersed themselves in the movie, laughing when something funny happened and sighing during sad scenes.

Explaining films to a blind audience can be challenging, especially for inexperienced volunteers. Yifan said that if he cannot complete presenting one scene before the characters start talking in the next, the trick is to wait until the end of the dialogue, go back to the previous scene and then explain the new one.

This requires a narrator to be familiar with all the plots and scenes in a movie. “I watch a film at least three or four times and write down details of the script,” he said.

Volunteers for the club learned their narrating skills from Zhou Quan, the founder of Xin Deng Theatre.

Zhou, 45, who was born in Beijing, travelled to Yunnan in 2010 to start his own business after working for years as a sales manager. Inspired by Xin Mu Theatre in Beijing, a small group of volunteers who were the first to present films to visually impaired audiences in China, he founded Xin Deng Theatre in Kunming in 2017 and has narrated more than 100 films for thousands of blind moviegoers.

“Movies are for everybody,” Zhou said. “Just because somebody is blind doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy a film. Xin Deng Theatre wants to help such people watch movies and to light up their lives.”

Many television and video companies have adopted narrated versions of productions in recent years, transforming onscreen action into the spoken word for blind audiences. Beijing Gehua CATV Network and Communication University of China have jointly made hundreds of movies with audio descriptions.

However, Zhou said an embedded voice is not as good as an onsite one, which is interactive and can evoke the “feeling of presence”.

In addition, Zhao said, Xin Deng Theatre is far more than just a venue to present movies. It is a place where the visually challenged can meet, talk and make friends with one another.

Previously published on Chinadaily.com.cn