About the Director/Screenwriter
Jia Lu: Graduated from the Department of Dramatic Literature, Beijing Film Academy, and later studied in France. Loves telling stories, has written a number of screenplays and has won some awards.
Goodbye, Our Baishizhou
Creative Statement
When the ruins of urban renewal fall on an individual, they mean a parting with no date of return. By telling the story of several children saying goodbye over a summer holiday against a real backdrop, I hope to distil and show care for "one kind of reality": China is a China on the move. People take their children from county towns to provincial capitals, and from provincial capitals to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, but the modernising renewal of a city punctures the illusions carried by this movement. Goodbye, Our Baishizhou is a farewell to the public places and memories that carried this movement, and the growing up and farewell of the children in the story.
Synopsis
Zhang Chengdong, Liu Yutong and Wang Zihao are three ten-year-old migrant children living in Baishizhou. In July 2019, the sudden redevelopment of Baishizhou puts their three families in three different situations. Chengdong's parents, whose business has suffered, plan to send him to a private primary school; Zihao's parents plan to send him to school in Hong Kong once they receive their demolition compensation; and Yutong, who lives alone with her mother, cannot find a suitable place to live because of everything her mother has been through. So that they can keep going to school together, Chengdong and Zihao secretly help Yutong look for a flat. When they find one, they decide to celebrate with Nayuki tea at a glitzy Shenzhen shopping mall. For the first time the three children see the other side of Shenzhen, and spend the best day of their lives. But because of what happens to Yutong's mother and the parents' fixed ideas, the children's dream of staying at school together is shattered: Yutong has to go back to her hometown, Harbin, and Chengdong is to be sent to a private school. How will they face this forced farewell to childhood?
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Genre:
Drama, Family, Children's -
Director/Screenwriter:
Jia Lu
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Producer:
Cong Yuchen
Logline
Baishizhou, Shenzhen, July 2019. A sudden demolition and redevelopment forces an unavoidable farewell on three children.