My People, My Country: A Chinese ‘main-melody’ omnibus film and its spectatorship

Abstract

My People, My Country (2019) is a Chinese multidirector omnibus film made to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. It has served as a winning model, emulated by two sequels: My People, My Homeland (2020) and My Country, My Parents (2021), constituting a ‘national day’ trilogy. This article takes the film as a case study to explore the spectatorship of the new type of Chinese ‘main-melody’ films, based on omnibus film theories and the auteur approach. It examines the focal film’s spectatorship from two dimensions: horizontal connections (i.e. how one episode connects with another) and vertical connections (i.e. how each episode is distinguished from the others), both of which are firmly based on the film’s omnibus structure. It argues that, as processes of discovery and establishing links that would otherwise remain unnoticed, the two types of connections constitute a source of pleasure for the audience. As a ‘main-melody’ film, political ideologies may infiltrate the audience while it is engaged in entertainment, particularly by the increasing number of cinephile audiences in contemporary China.