‘We’re waiting to grow old’. This sentence briefly sums up Yaoyun and his wife Liyun’s bitter realisation about their lives. They were once a happy family – until their son drowned playing by a reservoir. And so Yaojun and Liyun leave their home and plunge into the big city, although nobody knows them there and they cannot even understand the local dialect. Their adopted son Liu Xing does not offer them the comfort they had hoped for. Defiantly rejecting his ‘foreign’ parents, he one day disappears altogether. The married couple are repeatedly enmeshed in their memories. Finally, they decide to return to the site of their lost hopes.
“It is perhaps a pessimistic way of looking at it, but very much about one thing, those of us who grew up under the “one child” policy, which is the need to be extremely cautious about protecting your child and your family. So, what happens if disaster comes? And the impact of that era is much broader than just in between the family, it has had impacts on the level of the whole of society.” (Wang Xiaoshuai)
Wang Xiaoshuai
Internationally acclaimed Chinese director and writer Xiaoshuai Wang was born in 1966 in Shanghai and studied at the Beijing Film Academy. A pioneering director of 1990s independent Chinese cinema, he is one of the few filmmakers to remain true to his art in spite of the rampant commercialism of China's film market. The prolific filmmaker has received numerous international festival awards.