Living the Land

Living the Land is set in 1991 in Bawangtai, a farming village in rural China. Xu Chuang is 10 and lives with his grandmother. The house is always full of relatives, and the land sets the routine: what to plant, when to harvest, who helps whom.

The film follows the village through the boy's eyes across the seasons. He watches the work in the fields, the weddings and the funerals, the celebrations and the grown-up talk he does not always follow. Each event brings the whole community together and shows how much the families lean on one another.

But something is shifting. The village's young people start leaving, one after another, to look for work in the cities. Those who stay have to adjust, and the old way of farm life quietly loses ground. Chuang sees it all up close, without quite knowing what it means. Huo Meng, who also wrote and edited the film, tells the story slowly, with a sharp eye for small everyday moments.