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Clarence Tsui

4.5/5 stars
Contemporary Chinese cinema is littered with decades-spanning epics designed to chronicle the country’s changing fortunes in the 20th century.
With Living the Land, which won the best director award at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival, Huo Meng has achieved the same objective with a film unfolding across merely a year.
Revolving around a clan of impoverished farmers in Henan province, central China, in 1991, Huo’s second feature is a visually captivating, studiously structured and ceaselessly humane account of the anguish, anxiety and agitation sweeping rural China on the cusp of the country’s turbocharged plunge into market economics.

Bolstered by remarkably affecting performances from his ensemble of non-professional actors and stunning camerawork that reveals village life at its happiest and harshest, Huo has made a great leap forward from his debut, the modestly budgeted road movie Crossing the Border – Zhaoguan from 2018.
Central to Living the Land is Chuang (Wang Shang), a boy living with his mother’s extended family in a hamlet where electricity is scarce, tractors even more so, and struggling peasants make bricks in rickety kilns or even sell their blood to survive.
Chuang is part of the first generation of China’s “left behind children”, those whose parents have fled their hometowns for better-paid factory work in cities.
It’s also through him that we get to see and hear the cross-generational sufferings of the rural poor, as embodied by the painful past of his weather-beaten great-grandmother (Zhang Yanrong) and the crushed dreams of his young aunt (Zhang Chuwen).

There are certainly glimpses of the seismic social and economic changes unfolding – we see villagers gathering around the communal TV to watch the Chinese soap opera Migrant Working Girls, and the flight of Chuang’s uncles to Shenzhen, a booming city in southern China.
But Living the Land is more about those left at home, those who gritted their teeth and marched on – an ode to the forgotten farmers living out their most painfully mundane last days.
Huo’s meticulous re-enactments of local customs and rituals, and depiction of how they are shaped by the changing seasons, are almost anthropological in scope and flawlessly executed.
Book-ended by two drastically different funerals and punctuated with separations, marriages and births, Living the Land is akin to a journey through the cycles of nature and human existence in a long-vanished agrarian society. Life goes on, and so it must.
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Non-professional actors and stunning camerawork lift this engrossing story of the drastic changes experienced in rural China


Non-professional actors and stunning camerawork lift this engrossing story of the drastic changes experienced in rural China.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Non-professional actors and stunning camerawork lift this engrossing story of the drastic changes experienced in rural China

Non-professional actors and stunning camerawork lift this engrossing story of the drastic changes experienced in rural China