In 2020 I marked twenty years in film. So I wanted to find a fictional story that could hold the world I have experienced over these years and the changes that came with my own growth. Picking Cotton was written on this basis. Writing about the present from within the present is the hardest thing, and I am glad to have captured, in the tide of the times, the relationship between one woman and this country and this era. This story may be just one in hundreds of millions, but for a filmmaker, being able to show in the way I know best what China and the Chinese people are going through now may be the greatest tribute to this project. Ordinary and profound.
2021, during the annual cotton-picking season in Xinjiang, Li Jinkui, a woman from Sichuan who has just turned 40, sets out on a journey she has not undertaken for fifteen years. In 2003, the first time she went to Xinjiang with the army of cotton pickers, she lost her son, who was not yet three. From then on, her life took a different turn... Over eighteen years of social change, the cotton-picking industry in southern Xinjiang has been transformed: internet technology and mechanised harvesting have almost entirely replaced picking by hand, and all the people, events and things around her have moved forward with the tide of the times. Li Jinkui, who has stayed stuck in the past, feels that everything has changed. Only a chance encounter with A Zheng, a rebellious 18-year-old, unsettles memories she believes she has "forgotten". Confirming and denying over and over, she must make a choice at another turning point in her life. In the harvest season of the southern Xinjiang cotton fields, a lost son and a boy she has met again... seem, as if by fate, to echo something unknown within Li Jinkui's life...
Genre:
Drama, Women, Emotional DramaDirector/Screenwriter:
Xu LeleProducer:
Sun BowenProduction Company:
Shanghai Boyuan Culture Communication Co., Ltd.Executive Producer:
Wang HongweiXu Lele: Graduated in directing from the Department of Film and Television, Central Academy of Drama. Since graduating she has made her way in the world and grown through experience as a film and television teacher, advertising professional, theatre producer and screenwriter... For eleven years she has been the full-time carer of her elderly single mother, and will continue to be.
Sun Bowen: Bilingual producer. Graduated from the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), UK, in visual arts and aesthetics, and was a lifestyle columnist for "sun post". Since 2014 she has worked on the production of films including The Third Way of Love, The Admiral: Roaring Currents and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny. In 2019 she produced the well-received web series Your Future Has Been Delivered. In 2020 she founded Boyuan Media and serves as its CEO.
Shanghai Boyuan Culture Communication Co., Ltd.: Boyuan Culture brings together production and creative teams to develop quality content for niche markets, and has built a core team with strong aesthetic judgement and professional skills. Based on its creators, it aims to produce quality series and small and medium-budget films and to build brand value. Drawing on its distribution capacity, it gathers creative talent to support quality content.
Wang Hongwei: Screenwriter and executive producer; professor in the Directing Department, Beijing Film Academy; vice president of the China Film Directors' Guild; chair of the Qingcong Project.
Autumn 2021, cotton-picking season in southern Xinjiang. Li Jinkui, a woman from Sichuan, goes to Xinjiang alone to pick cotton. Fifteen years ago, she lost her son here when he was not yet three... As the times move on, Jinkui wavers between past and future. Only a chance encounter with A Zheng, an 18-year-old, awakens, as if by fate, something unknown within her life that echoes her own.