If you had told François-Marie Savina in 1925 that he’d be back in Hainan one day, not in a boat, but as a digital apparition chatting to a fashion designer, he’d have probably suggested you lay off the rice wine. Yet here we are, a hundred years later, watching the moustachioed French linguist waltz back into the island’s cultural life without so much as a visa stamp.
Savina’s original trek through Hainan produced Monographie de Hainan, a scholarly masterpiece that bottle-necked the essence of Li culture before modernity could sand off the edges. Thanks to A Voyage Through Time: Savina’s Hainan Island Monograph, he’s been dusted off, digitally reanimated, and paired with a contemporary Li Brocade designer who’s part historian, part stylist, and part-time traveller.
History Meets Haute Couture
The short film, debuting online on 8 August 2025, stages what the scriptwriter calls “a fictional encounter between Savina and a contemporary Li Brocade designer who weaves Li brocade motifs into futuristic fashion.” In other words, think National Geographic meets Paris Fashion Week, with an anthropological twist.
The production team has delved into Hainan’s photographic archives to conjure authentic 1920s landscapes that make you half expect to hear the clatter of a hand-cranked camera. But this isn’t sepia-tinted nostalgia. Using a MoE (Mixture-of-Experts) AI model, they’ve layered those landscapes with the depth and warmth of oil paintings, right down to the glint in a villager’s eye or the frayed edge of a woven sash.
Painting for Posterity (and UNESCO)
“As Hainan is bidding for the Hainan Tropical Rainforest and Traditional Settlements of the Li Ethnic Group to be included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, we wanted to ‘paint’ every stroke to honour both Savina’s legacy and Li cultural creativity,” the director explains.
For the uninitiated, UNESCO doesn’t hand out heritage titles like party favours. In 2022, the rainforest and Li settlements made it to the tentative list, heritage purgatory, before a protective legal framework for the villages was passed in 2023. The film, while stylish, doubles as a love letter to a culture that’s been quietly crafting beauty for centuries.
A Digital Encore Worth Watching
This is more than a clever art project for the Li people—it’s a global stage. For history lovers, it’s proof that archives aren’t just for scholars in dusty reading rooms; they can be playgrounds for creative reinvention.
And as for Savina, one imagines him standing there, digital but dappled, taking in the scene. A rainforest he once trudged through in leather boots now blooms in pixels; a culture he once documented in careful script now struts down a digital runway. Somewhere, perhaps, he tips his hat.
It’s the cultural reunion you don’t get from time machines—only from the happy collision of curiosity, craft, and a dash of audacity.
By Charmaine Lu
