‘Living the Land’ Review: Huo Meng’s Vital Ode to Ordinary Life in 1990s China
A cinema of ordinary life is also a cinema of culture.
A warmly lit frame of an extended rural family attunes us to their chatter after a modest night meal. Mothers run after their children; one of them is developmentally disabled, but in a rural Chinese village circa 1991 he is treated as a laughing stock. Men in their thirties scold teenage boys for jumping on a modern truck, forgetting that before they were farmers, they too ran through fields after automobiles that passed through a village where the plough and oxen are your daily temple. A wise-cracking elder smokes a cigarette while confiding to a relative how she has never beyond a certain ominous Iron Bottom Lake. She might remember the transience of childhood, even if she may have chosen to forget the book of pains that mark younger womanhood in a state that surveils and overwrites bodies.
More from IndieWire
Amidst this chaotic ensemble, there is a boy — an anchor for this family in a myriad under-appreciated ways, as we will come to see. “Living the Land” (“Sheng xi zhi di”), Huo Meng’s extraordinary second feature about countryside and country on the precipice of change, begins with this boy’s narration. He says he isn’t sure of his surname. He questions if this is his hometown. He doesn’t know the faraway place his parents work. But he dotes on his young aunt Xiuwing (Zhang Chuwen), whom he senses holds a well of regrets. He is devoted to his chatterbox great-grandma (Zhang Yanrong), insisting that she too eat candy brought in from the far away factories of Shenzen. And he is compassionate towards his cognitively challenged cousin, Jihua (Zhou Haotian), a kindness poised to encounter grief.
His name is Chuang (Wang Shang), he is 10 or 11 years old, he still wets his bed, and though Huo shows him in close-up just once or twice during the film’s span — a year of socioeconomic transition that’s chronicled with the clarity of an arrow and lensed by cinematographer Guo Daming from a respectful anthropological remove — young Chuang will witness a reluctant wedding and more than four funerals.
A cinema of patience is also a cinema of assurance. Huo’s craft here, appositely, is the antithesis of highfalutin. His pans don’t aim for omniscience. His dollies through agrarian acres are not meant to drum up suspense. His use of song is circumscribed. His one break from naturalistic realism is only a little distracting. Huo’s project is to portray these social relations and material disparities with crispness, therefore the image is sharp, and though expansive, also concise. The lilac sky at dawn isn’t romanticized because it follows a scene where men and boys extract bullets out of an uncle’s body before he is interred. Quietude does not become a century-long syndrome because Huo, while keeping the narrative at the remove of a wider angle, alert as always to the intrusion of the industrial, is interested in elevating the constant banter: the spray of instructions, the grunts, the fluid gossip, and the occasional slurpy respite of popsicles.
So while “Living the Land” could be compared to pastoral cinematic odes such as Assamese filmmaker Rima Das’s “Village Rockstars” for its rootedness or to the visually rigorous “Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell” by Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Thien An, it doesn’t boast the former’s intention of being crowd pleasing or the latter’s ache to sculpt gorgeous.
If “Living the Land” is still extremely handsome and involving, this is because Huo isn’t simply observing, he is telling a story too, just in larger temporal units. What happens when Jihua being a burden for his weary parents shifts to his becoming a liability for the entire village? Why does Xiuwing ask Chuang to deliver a clandestine letter to the school teacher at night, just a couple days before she is unceremoniously (and rowdily) married off to a callous influential man from a neighboring town? Or what is the effect on the farmers when the arrival of a single tractor costing 3000 yuan — a multiple of their collective annual income — promises to obliterate their very understanding of living with the land?
The sorrows of the women are also narrativized with poignancy and emotionality. When Guilan, Jihua’s mother, played with disarming honesty by Zhang Caixia, breaks down, wailing, “Why do so many bad things happen to us?” the accumulation of her sacrifices suddenly becomes prominent. After Chuang’s mother bids him goodbye at the end one of her infrequent visits, she cries softly all the way back to the station, feeling the full weight of the indebtedness she has to her clan for raising her son. Great grandma too seems to soften towards the end of the year, a lifetime of emotions getting more leavened as they peer into harvest.
A cinema of emotion is also a cinema of the quotidian.
That Huo doesn’t overemphasize the signifiers of change is an admirable kind of restraint. We fall in love with his characters as a clan, as a family, and as a village, but through Chuang’s eyes this tiny parcel of the world doesn’t have the warm connotations of “home.” Instead, an overwhelming sense of the endemic saturates the film.
I think of once-heralded movies where white expats long to return to their homeland, be it Karen Blixen, played by Meryl Streep in “Out of Africa,” when she reads A. E. Housman’s poem at her lover’s funeral, and utters the line, “Smart lad to slip betimes away, from fields where glory does not stay.” Or Kristin Scott Thomas’s Katharine Clifton in “The English Patient,” who talks about wanting to be buried in the garden in England where she grew up, far away from the Libyan desert in which she has found betrayal rather than love. By contrast, Chuang, Xiuwing, and Jihua can’t express any such wonderment, seek any glory, or escape their fields. Their lives are inextricable from the land — their own country colonizes them.
Huo begins his film in spring, and ends it in winter. There’s been another funeral. But there’s also now a tractor. The extended family, with Chuang clutching an urn of ashes, collaborates to lift the vehicle stuck in the mud and ice. Slowly, the camera zooms out, and a landscape of white and cold fills the screen, with our characters — suddenly they are just other people — plodding along, trying their best to adapt.
In the distance, a line of tall gaunt leafless trees becomes visible. It might even portend the future skyscrapers of Shanghai.
Grade: B+
“Living the Land” premiered at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.
Best of IndieWire
Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
