Claire is a documentary-style blogger from the Netherlands with a special theme: the stories of rural Chinese women.
She visits villages, recording different women's lives: women farmers, rural teachers, ICH craftswomen, mothers returning home to start businesses. These women's stories deserve to be seen, she says.
Claire lives alongside them for days: working together, eating together, listening to their choices and persistence. Her videos are quiet, sincere and respectful.
Rural women are a vital force in China's social development, she says. From Amsterdam to rural China, she wants to be their "listener" and "chronicler".
Claire is a European documentary creator focusing on stories of Chinese rural women - filming their labour, families, dreams and resilience with her lens.
Her subjects: she entered Chinese villages, interviewing many women - tea-growing aunties, guesthouse-owning sisters, returning-startup girls, grandmothers staying behind.
Content: "a day of a Chinese rural woman", "women on the tea mountain", "she who returned to start up" - documentary style, sincere and delicate.
Going viral: her "a day of a rural grandmother" video spread - recording her work from dawn to dusk, plain yet moving; viewers: "reminds me of my grandma."
Observations: "Chinese rural women carry astonishing tenacity - they shoulder life and smile gently."
Significance: an international recorder of Chinese rural women - showing the world their strength and the real face of villages.
Plans: over one year, recording 24 rural women into a documentary series, Them.
For readers: her videos move you with ordinary women stories - their daily lives are the truest epic of rural China.
Her deepest impression is Aunt Wu on the tea mountain - thirty years of tea farming, hands full of calluses, yet smiling "tea is bitter, days are sweet." Claire put that line at the video end; it became her most quoted shot. She also noticed young rural women using e-commerce, livestreams and guesthouses to bring new possibilities to villages. "I want to record not just hardship but their intelligence and hope."
She hopes Them is not just a documentary but a mirror - "let rural women see their own value, and city people see the real countryside." "Rural women stories deserve to be heard by more." She is contacting Chinese documentary platforms to air Them domestically. "If these stories move one person to call their grandmother, it is worth it."
"Every frame I filmed is evidence of their serious living."
"They never made grand speeches, yet live days stronger than any words."
"I carry their stories out of the village, hoping more people carry respect back in."
