Living the Land

Best Director, 2025 Berlin International Film Festival

With his parents working far away, 10-year-old Chuang is taken to a rural Henan village to live with his great-great grandmother, the chatty epicenter of a large extended family that spills into the vast ancestral lands they farm. Because it’s 1991 with Chinese industrialization a whisper away, Chuang’s days swell with each seasons’ demands–from baling hay, paying tuition with bags of corn, tending kilns–a collective muscle memory from thousands of years of tradition. But as the family struggles with serious money woes, their dynamics begin to twist with modernization, and Chuang’s closeness with a mentally disabled cousin and an aunt in an arranged marriage reveal faultlines he is powerless to repair.

Like epic tableau painting, LIVING THE LAND asks us to dwell in its breathtaking visuals and a panoply of characters poignantly detailed, even at the frame’s edges. Partly based on his own childhood in Henan, filmmaker Huo Meng’s slow tracking shots capture the multivocal touchpoints that comprise collective rural life and the humid biome of interdependence with fields, animals, weather, and the vastness of the horizon. Even the government is more nuisance than menace with oddly asynchronous census polls and fertility checks that periodically intrude on a daily rhythm so ancient as to be irrefutable.

Immersive, deeply human, and warmed with humor, LIVING THE LAND is an ode to the many Chinese villages like the one Huo hails from, a remembrance of a China not-yet-gone but receding like photographs in one’s memory.

– Christina Ree