HUO MENG’s vital poem for life in the 1990s China

Normal life cinema is also a cinema for culture.

A warm lighting frame for a extended rural family heading us to gossip after a modest night meal. Mothers run after their children; One of them is disabled, but in a Chinese village in the countryside around 1991, it is treated as a stock laughing. Men in the thirties of their thirties are boys in adolescence to jump on a modern truck, and they forget that before they were farmers, they also ran across the fields after the cars that passed through a village where the plow and the bulls are your daily temple. The wise elderly smokes a cigarette while it is limited to a relative how it has never exceeded a lake under the fateful iron. she You may remember childhood, even if she has chosen to forget the Book of Pain, which represents a younger femininity in the event that she wipes her bodies and writing on it.

In the midst of this chaotic group, there is a boy-embodiment of this family in countless ways, as we will see. “Living The Land” (“Sheng XI Zhi Di”), the second unusual feature of Huo Meng around the countryside and the country on the brink of change, begins with the novel of this boy. He says he is not sure of his title. He wonders if this is his hometown. He does not know the far place where his parents work. But he flows on his young aunt xiuwing (Zhang Chuwen), which unfortunately feels a well. He is devoted to his great grandmother (Zhang Yanrong), and he insists that she also eats the dessert that has been brought from the distant Shenzen factories. He is sympathetic to his cousin, who faces a perceived challenge, Jihu (Zhou Haotian), a kindness preparing to face sadness.

His name is Chuang (Wang Shang), at the age of 10 or 11 years old, and still wins his bed, and although Hu appears close to once or twice only during the film period-a year of social and economic transition that is dated with the clarity of the arrow and lentils By the Guo Daming from a respectable anthropological removal – the young Chawang will witness a hesitant wedding and more than four funerals.

Patience cinema is also a cinema for confirmation. Ho craft here, to some extent, is the opposite of Highfalutin. My article does not aim for all science. Its dolls through agricultural acre do not aim to break up suspense. Its use of the song has been restricted. One break from natural realism is only a little dispersal. The HUO project aims to portray these social relationships and material disparities in Hashim, and therefore the image is sharp, albeit, as well as brief. Lilac at Dawn is not romantic because it follows a scene in which men and children take out the lead from the uncle’s body before being buried. Quietude does not become a long syndrome from a century because Haw, while maintaining the narration when removing a wider angle, is on alert as it always is to industrial intervention, interested in raising constant joking: spray of instructions, gossip, fluid gossip, and mortar comfort of the lubricants.

So, while “Living The Land” can be compared to the pastoral cinematic Odes like the Assema Rima Das’s “Rock village“For its root or to” inside the inner cortex of the yellow east “by the Vietnamese director PAM Thien, it does not boast of the previous structure of being crowds or latter pain on the wonderful sculpture.

If “living on Earth” is still very handsome and includes, then this is because HUO does not simply monitor, it also tells a story, in larger time units. What happens when the faces are a burden on his exhausting parents turning until he becomes responsible for the entire village? Why does Xiuwing Chuang ask for a secret message to the school teacher at night, just two days ago that you will marry heterogeneous (and full) of a cruel influential man from a neighboring town? Or what is the impact on farmers when one tractor costs 3000 yuan – a double income of collective income – promises to obscure their understanding to live with the Earth?

Women’s sorrows are also listed with bias and passion. When Gwallian, Jihua’s mother, who plays Zhang Caixia, is collapsing, “Why do we have a lot of bad things?” The accumulation of its sacrifices suddenly becomes prominent. After Chouang’s mother put him in the end, one of her rare visits, she cries quietly to the station, and she felt the full weight of the debt that has a clan to raise her son. The great grandmother seems to reduce the end of the year, a period of emotions that reach more yeast with peers in the harvest.

Passion cinema is also a cinema for the lady.

HUO does not affirm the evidence for change is a kind of impressive restraint. We fall in love with his characters as a single, as a family, and as a village, but through Chouang’s eyes, this small expulsion in the world does not contain warm connotations of the “home”. Instead, the overwhelming feeling of obstetrics satisfies the movie.

I am once thinking about films in Herald where white expatriates yearn for their home Away, one of the fields where glory does not remain. ” Or Christine Scott Thomas Catherine Clifton inEnglish patient“Whoever talks about the desire to be buried in the garden in England, where she grew up, away from the Libyan desert in which she found betrayal instead of love. In contrast to that, Chuang, Xiuwing and Jihua cannot express any like this, Or search for any glory, or escape their fields. Their lives are inseparable from the ground – their country colonizes them.

Haw begins his movie in the spring, and ends in the winter. There was another funeral. But there is now a tractor. The extended family, with Chouang, who holds a jar of ash, is cooperating to lift the car stuck in the mud and ice. Slowly, the camera enlarges, and the landscapes of eggs and cold fill the screen, with our characters – suddenly they are just other people – they wander, try their best to adapt.

At the distance, it becomes a line of long trees without visible leaves. You may be transferred to the future skyscrapers of Shanghai.

Row: B+

“Living The Land” was first shown at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival. She is currently seeking to distribute us.

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