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 nearsightedness (近视), but in the past two years, a "talking film"club has enabled him to regain his love for the cinema.
The club is held in Kunming, where volunteers give vivid narrations (解说) to an audience including blind and partly sighted moviegoers. One volunteer, Yifan, has narrated more than 20 movies, doing so for the first time to an audience of more than 80 in November 2022. He said, "If I cannot complete the introduction to 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 so I watch a
film at least three or four times and write down details of the script (剧本). However, seeing the audience members absorbed in the movie, laughing when something funny happened and sighing during sad scenes, I could sense they were enjoying the film. I was so glad that I could bring enjoyment to my audience by narrating the movie. I felt as though I was shining a different light on their lives. "
Volunteers for the "talking movie" club learned their narrating skills from Zhou Quan, the founder of Xin Deng
Theater. Inspired by Xin Mu Theater in Beijing -- a small group of volunteers who were the first to introduce films to blind audiences in China, he founded Xin Deng Theater in Kunming in 2020 and has narrated more than 100 films for thousands of blind moviegoers. "Movies are for everybody. Just because somebody is blind, can't he/she enjoy a film?" Zhou said. "Xin Deng Theater wants to help such people watch movies and to light up their lives."
