Soul of the Corn (guhun)- 33 min - color - 2008

Directed by: Meilan, Lü Bin

The film depicts the last places where the Hani people still cultivate fallow lands with the traditional slash and burn method. The director, himself a Hani and a painter started painting all the process of the slash and burn cycle as a way of show the people some techniques in danger of disappear.

All the processes are shown in detail. The slash of the field, the way they prevent the fire to extend beyond the limits previously defined, the cleaning of the fields, the sowing, harvesting, threshing, and the ceremonies that accompany all these steps.

Through continuous interviews and educational meeting with the elders of the village Meilan persevere in his effort to not forget their traditional technical.

Openly favorable to the slash and burn cultivation, he provides some figures to support his view that slash and burn cultivation preserves the nature instead of destroy it, as the critics of this traditional method of cultivation argument (in the center of a hot debate during the last decades in South East Asia).

In the filed of Meilan we learn that in every field are cultivated around 160 different kinds of vegetables. But unfortunately the modern world is arriving also to these remotes lands in Damenglong. During the years that he worked in the graphic and visual documentation of these techniques, more than 20 varieties of corn have already disappeared.

Guhun was shown in 2009Yunfest.