There are more than 40 new films in theaters in May this year, including three documentary films that will be released this week, which are also worthy of the audience's choice - "Clouds on the Ground", which focuses on the working life of cotton farmers in Xinjiang like an idyllic poem; "Homecoming at Dusk", a documentary film that took eight years to prepare and shoot, and shows the living conditions of veterans in Taiwan, China for the first time; "Hot Years", which tracks and records the extraordinary lives of ordinary people in Shenzhen through the three dimensions of "Shenzhen employees", "Shenzhen people" and "Shenzhen".
"Clouds on the Ground": A documentary full of affection and warmth
Release date: May 7
The film records two families in Awati County in southern Xinjiang. Through cross-editing, it records the entire process of Erken's family and Zhao Qiang's family from cotton sowing to picking and selling. During the busy cotton picking season, they encountered various accidents, such as difficulty in finding harvesters, injuries and continuous rain. Family members worked together, and the two families' hard work for a year finally got a satisfactory reward.
The film uses the realistic film shooting method, which not only tells the story of cotton farmers picking and selling cotton, but also shows their real life scenes, simple family values, and the pursuit of creating a happy future with their hard-working hands like an idyllic poem.
Awati County is famous for its high-quality cotton production and is known as the "Hometown of Long-staple Cotton in China". In 2021 and 2023, the crew came here twice, lived and ate with local cotton farmers of all ethnic groups, recorded people's work, expectations, difficulties and harvests during the busy farming season, and vividly presented the unique daily life scenes and folk customs of the local area, depicting a vivid picture of the multi-ethnic customs of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
The film was directed by Liu Guoyi, director of China Film Group Corporation. It was the only Chinese film shortlisted for the "International Film Screening Unit" of the 26th Shanghai International Film Festival, won the honor of "Specially Recommended Director of the Year" at the 3rd Chinese Documentary Film Conference, was shortlisted for the main competition unit of the Golden Coconut Award at the 6th Hainan International Film Festival, and was shortlisted for the Docs for Sale unit of the 37th Amsterdam International Documentary Festival in the Netherlands. With its high quality and good reputation, it was selected into the annual key film and television program list of China Film Group Corporation.
"Returning Home at Dusk": I left home when I was young and returned when I was old, my accent remains unchanged but my hair has turned gray
Release date: May 10
As the first film to record the living conditions of veterans in Taiwan, China, "Homecoming" has been in preparation for eight years. After two years of searching, visiting and field shooting, the creators took six veterans with different ancestral homes, backgrounds and identities as the protagonists, and used real shots to tell their heartfelt voices longing to go home.
Every veteran carries with him a painful experience of being separated from his blood relatives.
Gao Binghan was born in December 1935 in a family of scholars and revolutionaries in Heze, Shandong. At the age of 13, he went to Taiwan with his fellow villagers. He is currently the president of the Heze Taiwan Association and a part-time professor at Heze University. In 1991, Gao Binghan, then 56 years old, followed the dying wishes of his fellow villagers and brought the ashes of Taiwanese veterans back to his hometown for burial for the first time. Since then, Gao Binghan has persisted in voluntary search for relatives for more than 20 years and brought the ashes of more than 100 Taiwanese veterans back to their hometowns on the mainland. He was therefore elected "The Person Who Moved China 2012".
Jiang Sizhang, whose ancestral home is in Zhoushan, Zhejiang, was arrested twice on his way home from school when he was less than 14 years old. Now he has been in Taiwan for 75 years. As one of the initiators of the "Mainlanders Return Home Promotion Association", he has been promoting the return of veterans. His words "If our parents are still alive, let us go back and offer them a cup of tea, and if they are dead, let us go back and offer them a stick of incense" represent the voices of countless veterans and shout out the deafening words of homesickness.
Veteran Fu Deze, whose ancestral home was Fengdu, Sichuan (now Fengdu, Chongqing), came to Taiwan at the age of 18. Recalling his life of being framed and imprisoned for three years, he said: "When I missed home, I sang "Little White Cabbage" in the cell." Jin Ying, whose ancestral home was Hefei, Anhui, once expressed his wish: "I want to return to my roots, to the mainland."
The documentary film "Returning Home at Dusk" was produced by Wang Tong, directed by Yang Zhengnong, and produced by Gu Jiafeng.
"Hot Years": A story about Shenzhen's struggle
Release date: May 10
"Hot Years" follows the stories of 8 groups of Shenzhen worker representatives to tell how the fate of ordinary people is closely linked to the city of Shenzhen from the past to the present.
The characters in the film are ordinary yet extraordinary: when a warehouse keeper insists on writing poems every day, when a programmer starts a talk show in his spare time, when intelligent robots begin to move towards the silver market, when a new batch of graduates join the grassroots trade unions, when young mothers think about how to get a city hukou, when left-behind children break the tranquility of a family, when an aging migrant worker in the special zone hopes to organize a 40th anniversary gathering of his co-workers, when a construction engineer begins to recall the memory of growing up with this city... No matter now or in the past, they all live here. They are witnesses of Shenzhen's rapid development and creators of their own ordinary lives.
If we use one word to summarize "Hot Years", director Wang Shaohan thinks it is "young": "In the past, we told the story of Shenzhen with too many halos and symbols. As young local creators, we live in Shenzhen and are based in Shenzhen. We especially hope to find a young perspective in the mainstream narrative and tell a documentary film that truly belongs to Shenzhen people."
