Director: Xiaoling Zhu.
The movie was filmed over several seasons with the Dong people, farmers from generation to generation. I met the 12-year-old girl who plays A Qiu, the main character in the movie, in an isolated village with no road and very little electricity. I was struck by how she loved to study. She was already a “little intellectual”, and the first in her family to have learned to read and write. I decided to make the movie from her point of view. In the movie, she wants to become a writer because she loves legends, she loves to tell the stories she invents. Perhaps she feels the urgent need to record her culture and language, an unwritten language that could disappear. The movie is close to the “neo-realist” tradition. It is purely fictitious, inspired by true facts and characters. It shows the reality of those families in which the parents go to work in far-off cities, and the grandparents raise the children, in addition to working in the rice paddies. I am a native of this region and wanted to depict how, in day-to-day life, tradition and modern society sometimes meet, and sometimes don’t.