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With 15 years of experience behind him, Zhou Bing thought he could take the risk of moving one step further.
Zhou Bing: [in Chinese] "Chinese audiences grew accustomed to docudramas years ago. The technique itself is not a novelty. But I took a risk by assigning fictional lines to the characters, something I have never done."
Narrator: [in Chinese] "Ever since her husband's death, Ah-long had not had enough hands to help on her farm. Her farmland went desolate, and the government mistook it for waste land and gave it to her nephew. That changed Ah-long's life."
Ah-long: [in Chinese] "That piece of land by the canal was under my name when I married into the Suo family. Apart from that land, I also got some other properties at that time.
So I had an expensive wedding. If I did not have that piece of land, how could I have had money to throw such a big wedding?"
It may sound too trivial to be included in a serious documentary, but as the director of the International Dunhuang Project, Susan Whitfield, explains, it is more than just a court record.
Susan Whitfield: "We have little windows into ordinary people's lives, and that's what's so exciting, because otherwise those people would have been completely unknown to us."
Seeing actors perform the scene, the audience cannot help but get involved, and according to Zhou Bing, that's exactly what he wants to achieve.
He tells me it was the experience of directing a play - also about Dunhuang's history - that led Zhou Bing to rethink the documentary's potential for being dramatic and interesting.
The 2007 avant-garde play did not fare too well at the box office, but making it inspired Zhou Bing to make his documentary.
