CCTV Docuseries
Xu Zhimo and His Contemporaries
Chinese → English Subtitling
Some stories deserve to travel. This documentary, produced by China Central Television and reaching an audience of over 120 million viewers, presented a unique challenge: preserving the rhythm and emotional weight of spoken Mandarin while crafting English subtitles that felt natural on screen — never stiff, never rushed.
Michelle handled the full subtitling workflow, balancing timing constraints with tonal fidelity to ensure every line landed the way it was meant to. The result was a viewing experience that felt seamless across both languages.
Poet. Romantic. Wanderer. Xu Zhimo left behind not only some of the most beloved verses in modern Chinese literature, but a constellation of relationships that shaped an era. This CCTV docuseries moves through his world portrait by portrait — friends, lovers, and family — reconstructing the intimate human story behind the legend. Through archival imagery, letters, and scholarship, the series invites viewers into a vanished world where art, ideology, and emotion collided at the dawn of modern China.