A welcome antidote to the mood of a time which seems hell-bent on closing borders and building walls, The Music of Strangers is about a unique musical collective that breaks through division and reaffirms the potential of culture to unite. Subtitled “Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble”, Morgan Neville’s film is about the band that came into being at the beginning of the millennium on the initiative of the great Chinese-American cellist, giving us snapshots from its history, as well as the stories of some of its many and varied members.

It focuses on the lives of these individuals of diverse cultural achievement and inquisitive intelligence, who came together from a variety of backgrounds in the exploratory spirit of music. Ma brought its first players together in 2000 as part of his own interest in going beyond his career as a soloist: it drew on musicians from countries along the eponymous ancient trading route which for centuries had connected East and West – among them Syria, Iran and China, players from which are featured here. Neville’s film opens with an impromptu open-air jam session on a waterside square in Istanbul, and it’s that city more than any other which embodies the coming-together of two worlds.

Culture overlaps with politics at every turn 

There can’t be any absolute qualifications for joining though, and subsequent members have appeared by recommendation, almost as friends of friends, like Cristina Pato, an irrepressible presence in the group who’s a master of the Galician bagpipe, the gaita. She is one of the four musicians Neville follows back to their points of origin. Cristina is much concerned with the continuity of Galicia’s traditional culture, while Wu Man, a virtuoso of the pipa, the Chinese lute, explores the disappearing traditions of the remote regions of her native land.

Culture overlaps with politics at every turn: Man is from the first post-Cultural Revolution generation of Chinese musicians (she featured in the 1980 Oscar-winning From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China, a loose cross-cultural documentary predecessor to this film). Kayhan Kalhor, player of the kamancheh, the Persian spiked fiddle, escaped the Iranian revolution in 1979, and his continuing engagement with his homeland is complicated. Syrian clarinettist Kinan Azmeh is cut off for the moment from his Damascus past: one of the film's many moving sequences shows him engaging children at the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan in music (pictured below).

Bringing it all together is the irrepressible Ma, born in Paris, transplanted at an early age to America – we see his performance as a seven-year-old at the Kennedy White House, introduced by Leonard Bernstein, whose own search for a universal music language has surely proved an ongoing inspiration. Since then he has grown into an impish maestro, whose sense of fun suggests he doesn’t take life quite as seriously as he does art. The cellist himself isn’t the film’s main subject by any means, but The Music of Strangers offers insights into the demands made of any high-profile musician: for Ma, every journey he takes, even within America, involves an element of cultural diplomacy. He reckons he has been away from home, on tour, for roughly 22 of the 35 years of his married life: his son grew up assuming his father worked at Boston’s Logan airport, so frequently did he travel there.

We don't learn everything here, never quite seeing how the Ensemble actually works, whether through genuine jazz-style group improvisation, or if a composer or conductor sometimes plays a more decisive role. Best-known for his Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom about the world of backing musicians, Neville’s last film Best of Enemies, about the Gore Vidal-William F Buckley 1968 television debates, was certainly tighter, but The Music of Strangers plays engagingly on the inevitably picaresque nature of its subject (camerawork and editing are outstanding). We may get only a glimpse into this “Manhattan Project of music”, but it’s an energetic – and energising – journey, one that reveals much, in the broadest sense, about origins, destinations, and where we may belong.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Music of Strangers

It’s comforting to reflect that some of the anonymous children seen in Around China With a Movie Camera – a DVD culled from films spanning 1900-48 held in the BFI National Archive – must live on today. If only the means existed to identify those former kids so they could see those moments from their pasts when they were photographed with their parents and companions.

Terracotta warriors, Bactrian two-humped camels, Heavenly Horses, Buddhist caves, sand dunes, the world’s first printed book, a silk factory and temples galore including one that was the great mosque in Xi’an, were but some of the ingredients in a breathless first hour in a trilogy of programmes about the world’s oldest trading routes. They were opened up by the explorer and trader Zhang Qian of the Western Han dynasty, about 2,300 years ago.

The playwright Anders Lustgarten has spent a considerable chunk of his life reading and writing and thinking about China, and clearly wants to set a few points straight. Tired of the persistent Western view of that country and its people as inscrutable and mysterious, and exasperated by what he sees as the clumsy anti-Maoist propaganda of popular works such Jung Chan’s Wild Swans, he has written a play that looks at the effects of the Mao years on a gaggle of ordinary people in one ordinary village – the fictional rural backwater Rotten Peach.

Last year China began formally to phase out the one-child policy which had been in place since 1979. So a drama called One Child arrives at the right time. It forms the least worshipful component of the BBC’s current China season, which mainly interests itself in food and history. Its focus is in fact not on the ruinous psychological and economic consequences for a nation of only children. Instead the drama deals with another contemporary Chinese ill: the corruption of the legal process by power and money.

The mesmerising martial arts drama The Assassin consolidates the reputation of the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien as one of world cinema’s pre-eminent artists. Every film he has made since the emergence of his mature aesthetic – grounded in long shots, narrative economy, and the kind of emotional reticence that characterises Yasujiro Ozu’s work – has the quality of a revelatory, almost sacred text.

China’s tumultuous recent past attempted to selectively obliterate the history of one of the world’s great and ancient civilisations, with the neatly complementary result in the past several decades of a huge upsurge in Chinese studies, East and West, from publications to exhibitions to enormous advances in archaeology.  At the same time, a sense of preserving the material past has been threatened by urban development, a habit copied perhaps from the West.

I think of Rose English as the performer who made Miranda Hart’s success possible. I remember seeing her back in the 1980s, improvising solo at a theatre in Chenies Street. She had the audience curling up with embarassed laughter as she took off her heavy boots, stuffed her large feet into dainty ballet pumps and slipped a delicate tutu over her too, too solid frame. While gallumphing around the stage trying to look as elegant and etherial as an anorexic ballet dancer, she addressed various topics such as ambition, longing, appearance, desire, gender and so on.

Metal figures on the foreshore of Crosby Beach, Liverpool, set against a sunset, signify the preoccupations of Antony Gormley. The sculptor has been concerned consistently with the human figure, manifested in metal – lead or iron – casts of his own body.

Here comes the President, and with him a timely reminder about what the Chinese have been digging up over the past 40 years or so to further demonstrate their exceptional imperial history over the past two millennia. Treasures of the Jade Empire rather breathlessly told us of revelatory excavations of the tombs of the Han Emperors, and the regional kings they nominated to act as surrogate rulers over their gigantic empire – its boundaries closely related to China today.