A young migrant worker moves from job to job, saying goodbye more often than he stays. A Yi ethnic minority youth leaves his mountain hometown to chase a football dream, filming the process as setbacks pile up. A retired single mother and practitioner of jiu-jitsu tries to return to competition, weighing ambition against the realities of love and family.

These three lives are part of “Nobody, But Somebody,” a new six-part documentary series set far from the spotlight of urban China. Across its episodes, the series follows young people whose efforts often go unrewarded, and who must learn to live with that uncertainty rather than escape it.

The project took shape in 2023, when filmmaker Tse Shuhao returned to China after studying documentary filmmaking at New York University. The pandemic had formally ended, but everyday pressures remained: saving money was harder, work felt less predictable, and long-term plans were increasingly difficult to map out.

Tse responded by turning his attention to other people’s lives. “I decided to film other people’s stories to look for my own answers,” the 31-year-old from Shanghai said. Beginning in March 2023, he developed “Nobody, But Somebody” as a long-term project, following six subjects over nearly three years.

Structured as six self-contained yet interconnected episodes, the series premiered on Nov. 18 last year, tracing how its subjects navigate work, ambition, and disappointment when their lives fail to follow familiar scripts of success.

Though it drew less attention than Tse’s earlier work on a medical documentary, “ Life Matters,” which had reached a much wider audience, it gained recognition within documentary circles, earning awards at the CNEX Chinese Doc Forum, Sunny Side of the Doc in France, and Tokyo Docs.

And months after its release, the series has prompted discussion on social media platforms, where viewers have drawn parallels between the protagonists’ experiences and their own.

Last week, Sixth Tone spoke with Tse about producing “Nobody, But Somebody” and the challenges of carrying out a three-year documentary project at a time when China’s video platforms increasingly shift to short, mobile-first content.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sixth Tone: How did “Nobody, But Somebody” begin, and what were you hoping to understand through the six stories?

Tse Shuhao: The project was originally conceived under the title “Non-C-Position Youth.” What we were most curious about was the mental state of young people in the post-pandemic period: the confusion, the feeling that it was hard to save money, the uncertainty around careers, and a general feeling of wanting to escape.

For each episode, we tried to identify what I call a “core proposition,” or a true question.

The first episode is a family documentary directed by one of the filmmakers. It looks at family relationships and what happens as you begin trying to rebuild ties with parents and siblings in your 30s.

The second episode takes a female perspective, following a retired single-mother jiu-jitsu athlete attempting a comeback. It also examines love — specifically power dynamics within a relationship — because the “man behind her,” her boyfriend, does not fit traditional expectations of masculinity.

The third episode centers on blind massage therapists and their pursuit of love and intimacy. Many massage clinics hold annual matchmaking events. The desire for romantic connection is intense, but unlike sighted people, they face additional barriers.

The fourth and fifth episodes follow two very different figures: a Yi ethnic minority youth chasing a football dream, and a meteorite hunter in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region obsessed with finding a lunar meteorite. Both stories circle the same question: Does effort actually pay off? I still believe people should try, even when something seems hopeless. The process matters more.

The sixth episode looks at a more universal life trajectory, one shaped by repetition across generations. The protagonist, Su Wenyuan, is a third-generation migrant worker. For me, he represents the majority of people in China. In rural areas, you meet many people like Su: after finishing junior high or high school, they go out to work, support a family, get married. The pattern repeats.

Because the six stories are so different, post-production was extremely difficult. Almost nothing from one episode could be reused in another. You might finally get one episode to work, only to realize that none of the structure applies to the next. We were constantly tearing things down and rebuilding them.

Sixth Tone: Do the six stories share any common threads?

Tse: I wouldn’t dare say these six characters represent all young people in China. But they do share certain themes.

One of them is loneliness. Take Su, the protagonist of the final episode. As a migrant worker, he is constantly saying goodbye to friends. One of them once said that after coming to Shanghai, he felt trapped inside Charms Hotel, right in the busiest part of the Bund. He lived in subsidized dorm housing in a commercial district, commuting only between his bar job and his dorm. That kind of loneliness under bright lights is brutal.

Another shared theme is desire. When we’re young, we want to be heroes. We used to believe that effort guaranteed success. In recent years, that hasn’t always been true. You can put in enormous effort and still get very little in return.

For example, the protagonist of the first episode wants to become a director remembered by history. I don’t think that’s embarrassing at all. That’s why the main poster is filled with symbols of desire — boxing gloves, cameras, and other objects — with a young person standing below, looking up at them.

But the most important commonality is the courage to act. Even after what might be considered “failure” by conventional standards, none of these people completely gave up.

In the episode about blind massage therapists, one woman chooses to return to her hometown to look for her boyfriend, even though he has made it clear he does not want to continue the relationship, largely because of family pressure to marry someone without a disability. From a third-party perspective, I might think this is not the best choice. But she made a decision and acted on it.

Sometimes, I feel the one lacking courage is actually me. My protagonists are the ones giving me courage. At campus screenings, some students told me they strongly identified with the protagonist of the first episode.

At the end of the first episode, after the protagonist finds a new job, he realizes how much of his earlier anxiety during unemployment now feels like unnecessary self-pity. You need to get moving and find something to do.

I hope the series offers some strength — the idea that you are still young, and you can always continue.

Sixth Tone: Was there one protagonist who affected you most personally?

Tse: I cried many times because of Lama. He is the protagonist of the fourth episode — a Yi ethnic minority youth chasing a football dream and documenting his journey through short videos that eventually went viral.

He barely went to school and relies almost entirely on lived experience to navigate life. I see him as someone caught between two eras.

Now that village football leagues are booming, I sometimes think Lama was simply unlucky. He missed the right moment. Younger kids today have organized teams, better sports infrastructure, and clear pathways from primary school to professional training.

At the same time, the generation before Lama’s didn’t even have a railway connecting their hometowns to the city. There were no social platforms, no exposure to the outside world, and little reason to imagine becoming a professional athlete.

Lama, through short videos, was able to see the world. He developed dreams. He endured countless detours and setbacks, made it to larger cities, and briefly played on professional pitches — coming close, then facing disappointment again.

What moved me most were his videos. Whether it was his football books being burned by other children to keep warm, or having to take his mother to the hospital on New Year’s Eve, he would always begin the next video by saying, “Hi everyone, it’s a new day again,” as if none of it were a big deal.

At one point, I wondered whether I should try to help Lama in my own way. But then I asked myself: Is what we consider the “right path” really the best one? Who says someone has to follow a preset route? This is a road no one has walked before.

During the second and third years of the project, many people questioned whether it could even be finished. Lama gave us strength. Like him, there came a moment when we simply stopped considering failure as an option. After investing so much, you have to see it through. At least to give yourself an answer.

Sixth Tone: At a time when platforms favor speed and scale, does a three-year production cycle still make sense?

Tse: Projects that take three years to make are becoming extremely rare. They aren’t commercially efficient, and they’re hard to industrialize. As the economic environment tightens, investors are more cautious about long-term projects. Still, I think long-term filming is necessary.

Take the short-video “clip edits” that circulate online. Some clips from our series received tens of thousands of likes when repackaged with narration. But short video works as a kind of feeding mechanism — it breaks everything down for the viewer.

When you watch a full-length film on your own, the experience is much richer. In the jiu-jitsu episode, for example, the episode director — who is also a mother — focused more on the protagonist’s identity as a parent. I was more interested in the power dynamics within her intimate relationship.

Maybe AI will eventually automate short-form documentary breakdowns. But what we need are refined, complex works that can be revisited. Documentary, at its core, helps us understand the world. It’s a bridge that connects different lives and fosters mutual understanding.

At the same time, I’m also thinking about sustainability. Overseas platforms operate in a more industrialized way, at least ensuring a stable baseline of quality. That level of narrative and production maturity is something we still need to develop.

Sixth Tone: With so many people recording their own lives, has it become harder to make documentaries?

Tse: On the surface, there is more recorded material than ever. But for documentaries, the space has actually narrowed. People are very clear about what they are willing to show — and what they are not.

We abandoned one potential subject after the person experienced a personal setback and disappeared entirely, refusing further filming. That kind of disappearance is common. With many protagonists — including the migrant workers in the final episode — people often vanish at moments of vulnerability.

That’s the reality of filming now.

After the series was released, I felt happy and excited, eager to hear the feedback — but also a bit nervous. It was a complicated mix of emotions. For any film, reach still matters. In the end, it comes down to whether audiences can actually sit through and keep watching what you’ve made.

At the same time, the people in the documentary gave me the courage to accept the outcome. Watching them, I realized that life is about struggling and muddling through. You can’t fixate too much on results. If the outcome is only so-so, then you accept it.

This may be where the series ends for now. But maybe years from now, when people return to it, they’ll feel something different.

Sixth Tone: Looking ahead, what kinds of stories do you want to tell next?

Tse: I’m increasingly interested in how a documentary can cut through an era. Three years feels like a long time, and the lives we filmed did change. But measured against an entire lifetime, it’s still only a fragment.

While filming, I often felt I couldn’t fully penetrate the story, that I was only beginning to understand how the era shaped these individuals, and how their lives fit into a broader context.

That’s why I admire documentaries like “O.J.: Made in America,” which follows an entire life arc. What fascinates me is how directors use archival footage and interviews to build work with deeper historical resonance. That’s a direction I want to explore next.

Editor: Apurva.

(Header image: A still from “Nobody, But Somebody.” Courtesy of the crew*)*