Wang Rui
Winner Profile
Best Director
Director, Chaogtu with Sarula
Jury Citation
In Chaogtu with Sarula, director Wang Rui uses a calm, unadorned realist style to tell of the undercurrents beneath the quiet life of an ordinary herding family on the grassland. The imagery is vast and evocative, carrying poetry and emotional force, and it closely joins the natural landscape of the grassland with the characters' inner feelings, depicting the tensions between personal freedom and family responsibility, and between the advance of modern industrial civilisation and the traditional nomadic culture of the grassland. Winner of Best Director.
Chaogtu with Sarula: Synopsis
Chaogtu with Sarula tells of an ordinary Mongolian herding couple whose different ideas of a good life lead them into a predicament. The wife, Sarula, believes a good life means working from sunrise to sunset with her husband on the grassland. The husband, Chaogtu, tired of the dull, monotonous life of a herder, believes a good life lies far away, beyond the grassland, and leaves home again and again without telling his wife...