Follow Your Heart: China's New Youth Movement

Robert L. Moore reviews Follow Your Heart: China's New Youth Movement, directed by Duncan Jepson (2007, 89 minutes)

Follow Your Heart: China’s New Youth Movement offers a fascinating look at an emerging trend among China’s millennial generation. This trend, which borrows heavily from hip hop and other American youth culture movements, is not yet dominant among young Chinese, but Follow Your Heart offers hints that its day will come – and in the not-too-distant future.

The opening scenes of the film, those overlain with the credits, give a brief depiction of China’s history, including portraits of the Empress Dowager, street scenes from the turn of the twentieth century, images from the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and of President Nixon’s historic 1972 visit. What these opening images imply is that China has come a long way in the last century or so, a message that serves to emphasize the dramatic departure from the past that the “new youth movement” represents.

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edited by cgao on 4/9/2015