A cinema Of ordinary life is also a cinema of culture.
A warmly lit frame of an extended family in the countryside adapts to their talk after a modest night meal. Mothers run after their children; One of them is development -in -activated, but in the countryside Chinese Village about 1991 he is treated as a laughing layer. Men in the thirties bark teenage boys to jump on a modern truck and forgot that before they were farmers, they also ran through fields after cars passing through a village where the plow and oxen are your daily temple. A wisely cracking elder smokes a cigarette while she trusts a relative how she never has in addition to a certain ominous iron floor. She perhaps remember the transition to childhoodAlthough she may have chosen to forget Book of Pains, which marks younger femininity in a state that monitors and writes over bodies.
In the midst of this chaotic ensemble, there is a boy-an anchor for this family in a countless under-esteem way, as we will see. “To live the country“(” Sheng XI Zhi di “), Huo Meng’s extraordinary other function on landscapes and land on the change in change, begins with this boy’s story. He says he is not sure of his last name. He questions whether this is his hometown. He does not know the distant place that his parents work. But he dots on his young aunt Xiuwing (Zhang Chuwen), which he knows has a well of regret. He is dedicated to his chatterbox grandmother (Zhang Yanrong) and insists that she also eats sweets that were taken in from the far away factories in Shenzen. And he is compassionate to his cognitively challenged cousin, Jihua (Zhou Haotian), a kindness who is ready to face grief.
His name is Chuang (Wang Shang), he is 10 or 11 years old, he still woven his bed, and although Huo shows him in close -up just once or twice below filmS Trans – A year with socio -economic transition that is chronic with the clarity of an arrow and lensed by Kinematographer Guo Daming from a respectful anthropological removal – young Chuang will witness a reluctant wedding and more than four funerals.
A patience is also a cinema for insurance. Huo’s crafts here, Appue, is the antithesis to Highpalutin. His cuisine does not strive for omniscientness. His dolls through agrarian acres are not intended to drum up tension. His use of singing is rewritten. His only break from naturalistic realism is just a little distracting. HUO’s project is to produce these social relationships and material differences with sharpness, therefore the image is sharp, and even if it is expansive, also briefly. The Lilac sky at dawn is not romanticized because it follows a scene where men and boys extract bullets from an uncle’s body before he is interested. The silence will not be a century -long syndrome because HUO, while keeping the story at the removal of a wider angle, warning as always for the industry’s intrusion, is interested in raising the constant: the spray of instructions, the cruelty, the liquid gossip and single slurpy break by popsicles .
So while “Living the Land” could be compared to pastoral cinematic oes as the as -Sami filmmaker Rima Das’s “Byrock stars“For its rootness or to the visually rigorous”Inside the yellow cocoon shell“By Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Thien an, it does not boast the former intention to be the crowd pleasant or the latter values to sculpt wonderful.
If “Living the Land” is still extremely handsome and involved, this is because HUO just does not observe, he also tells a story, only in larger temporary units. What happens when Jihua is a burden for his tired parents shifts that he becomes a responsibility for the entire village? Why does Xiuwing Chuang ask a secret letter to the school teacher at night, just a few days before she is uncomfortable (and rowing) married to a cold influential man from a nearby city? Or what is the effect on the farmers when the arrival of a single tractor costs 3000 Yuan – a multiple of their collective annual income – promises to wipe out their understanding of living with the country?
Women’s grief is also told with gripping and emotional. When Guilan, Jihua’s mother, played with disarming honesty by Zhang Caixia, breaks down, quarrels, “Why do so many bad things happen to us?” The accumulation of her sacrifices suddenly becomes prominent. After Chuang’s mother invites him goodbye to one of her rare visits, she cries softly all the way back to the station and feels the full importance of debt she has to her clan to raise her son. Grandma also seems to soften towards the end of the year, a lifetime of emotions becomes more acidic as they look into the harvest.
A cinema of emotions is also a cinema of the quotidian.
The fact that HUO does not emphasize importance of the changes is an admirable type of restraint. We fall in love with his characters as a clan, as a family and as a village, but through Chuang’s eyes this little package in the world does not have the warm connotations of “Home.” Instead, an overwhelming sense of the endemic film saturates.
I think about once happens to films where Vita Expats longing to return to his home country, whether it is Karen Blixen, played by Meryl Streep in “Out of Africa”, when she reads Ae Housman’s poem at her lover’s funeral and pronounces the line, “Smart charged to slide betimes away, from fields where glory does not stop.” Or Kristin Scott Thomas’s Katharine Clipon in “The English patient“Who speaks of wanting to be buried in the garden in England where she grew up, far away from the Libyan desert where she has found storage rather than love. However, Chuang, Xiuwing and Jihua cannot express any such wonders, seek any glory or escape their fields. Their lives are incomprehensible from the country – their own country colonizes them.
Huo starts its film in the spring and ends it in the winter. It has been another funeral. But there is now also a tractor. The extended family, with Chuang that holds an urn of ash, collaborates to lift the vehicle stuck in the clay and ice. Slowly zooming the camera out, and a landscape of white and cold fills the screen, with our characters – suddenly they are just other people – ploding with and trying their best to adapt.
At a distance, a line with high leafless trees becomes visible. It can even be portrayed the future skyscrapers in Shanghai.
Rating: B+
“Living the Land” premiered at 2025 Berlin International Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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