Discovery Atlas

-a Travel around the World

“One thing important in life is that either your feet or your heart is on the way.” When traveling in person becomes impossible, it is precious and indispensable to have a curious view of the world through the mind travelling. That’s what Discovery Atlas provided us, an opportunity to discover the different lands.

This documentary series has talked about different people’s stories to reveal the culture of countries: France, China, Italy, Australia, etc. Different stories collide and compliment each other and have their own attracting moments. For example, to talk about the reform and changes in France, it mentioned a firework designer who builds the dream for the French people, a free climber who conquers the peak without protection of the rope, a parkourer who invents his own adventure in the city Paris, a gastronome who is bringing reform for the French food and a woman bomb disposal expert who changes people’s perception of a woman’s occupation.

The documentary has brought something worthy to learn: to introduce a country, you don’t use the picture of the scenery, the fact of the development, nor the number to mark its progress, you need to tell stories. To link the nature and the human together. The interaction between human and the world is the most beautiful. In this documentary, it extracted the vivid life of people living in it. It reveals things they are up to, difficulty and challenges they are facing to, dreams they are following. It links the life with the audience to resonate with them yet they convey some spirits and experiences that are unique and admirable. That’s how a country being built up by a group of persons that have passion and working hard in it.

Still there are something that could be improved with the documentary: on one hand, using a few people to represent a country really needs the in-depth understanding for a country so that to select the most typical stories. That’s what the documentary failed to do. Sometimes the people selected could be too famous to represent the normal life, and sometimes the stories did not directly link to the core of the nation’s spirit but stay in a personal level. On the other hand, with too many stories in a country, it’s sometimes difficult to deal with the common point of those stories and some stories are talked too little(beginning hastily without too many development into it). This requires the documentary to create guideline for each country and to more reasonably balance the proportion of each story.

All in all, its construction outline in all for people to travel with the documentary is extraordinary but the small details still need to be dealt with. And finally, based on this story, it’s always a recommendation for people to go experience themselves and to create their own exploration.

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Useful link:

Trailor for Discovery Atlas France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmDru6JlHlY

Pictures from: Douban