Chinese minority documentaries often operate through a dual logic: they make minority lifeworlds publicly visible while also translating cultural plurality into nationally intelligible narratives of unity. This article examines Chen Xiaoqin’s Longji (1994) and Feng Lei’s Falling Snow in Yili (2001), two Chinese minority documentaries produced within the broader period between 1989 and 2002, when market reforms, the restructuring of television documentary production, and the emergence of independent documentary practices reshaped the conditions of documentary representation. It argues that minority documentaries should be analysed not only through themes or broad modal categories, but through the formal means by which social life is made publicly readable. Through a matched comparison, the article identifies two divergent regimes of documentary legibility. Longji produces administrative-teleological legibility through categorical naming, selective voice-over anchoring, institutional framing, and seasonally indexed progression, rendering Red Yao life as a publicly accountable problem of schooling, scarcity, and intervention. By contrast, Falling Snow in Yili produces experiential-durational legibility through mood-first calibration, localised domestic speech, routine accumulation, and lyrical return, making Kazakh family life intelligible as durational coherence rather than as an administrable case. The comparison reframes the expository/observational divide as a contrast between two epistemic arrangements, each with distinct political trade-offs. Documentary form, therefore, emerges not as a neutral container of ethnic difference, but as a technology that conditions what kind of minority life can be known, by whom, and toward what horizon of unity.
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