Deming Chen: Always

If I could, I would take many images from this beautiful documentary and put them on the wall. Most of them B/W images in academy format with many of them colored in blue, yellowish for instance. All is so well composed and thought. Cinema! Images from inside the family’s house with faces difficult to perceive, often enclosed by smoke from the fireplace. Wonderful.

It is poetry and it is about poetry that comes from children in a school in a Chinese mountain area. Their short poems are presented on the images – English translation discreetly in the bottom corner – mostly related to the nature surrounding them but also – at the end – comes a poem that is a “farewell to childhood”. The film has a text in the beginning saying “a letter to childhood” with Gong Yubin as the protagonist. Childhood as it is and should be as long as it lasts.

Gong is a child – see the photo – curious, wants to discover the world, lives with his grandparents and his father, his mother ran away from the hard conditions of the family that has pigs and cows and are farmers, who work hard to make ends meet in the foggy landscape. Do you miss your mother, the director asks Gong, who has built a den of hay, “will answer you later”, he says smiling, a boy who takes his walks alone in the nature, observing, when he is not in school or helping his one-armed father chopping wood.

The government’s propaganda comes out of the loudspeakers in the village, life goes on as always, the grandmother is a strong woman, who interprets the harsh life conditions as fate, when something fails, her husband calls the butcher to come as the pigs “are on hunger strike” (!), grandmother will stop giving Gong pocket money if he uses them on junk food, Gong is with his father in town and gets a bike, if I get it right, normal life conveyed in an extraordinary way. Yes, I write with pleasure: Masterpiece! Visually Magnificent!

China, France, 2025, 80 minutes.