Logline
A warm story about time, a short family history with laughter and tears; everyone can find a reflection of their own life in the film.
Mist of the South
Creative Statement
Mist of the South is a warm short history of time. It presents the small details of time passing within a family, and the images make visible the passing of time and the aging of the older generation. If the theme of time is broken down further, it is in a sense also a youth film. The grandson, Wang Qian, represents the "teenage angst" of a first bitter experience, and the change and growth that follow. The middle-aged father, Wang Yunjiang, represents "youth gone by" (the romantic, poetic university campuses of the 1980s), a kind of gift and reflection left by the past. Grandpa represents "a passionate youth in the last stage of life": responsibility and companionship, fierce and tender. The three storylines mirror one another and trace the cycle of time, and everyone can find a reflection of their own life in the film. Grandma's final farewell in the romantic dream of the "garden in the sky" offers a warm deconstruction of death. In this "post-pandemic era", marked by a serious lack of death education and widespread collective anxiety, this way of defining and expressing "love" and "the true nature of life" may generate word of mouth that draws audiences to the cinema.
Synopsis
The quiet, deep lives of three generations of one family are like three cross-sections of a life. But Grandma, who has dementia, makes ever wilder scenes about going back to her home village. In the chaotic world of her hallucinations, there is nothing but the chickens, ducks, geese and dogs of her old home, her small plot of land, and painful memories buried deep in the past that no one knows about. With Grandma turning the household upside down, Grandpa, an old rascal, rages at her that she is "too old to die and a curse to herself and everyone else", yet secretly begins, with the patience of the old man who moved mountains, to build her a grand garden in the sky above the city of steel and concrete, on the rooftop of their housing complex. Through this "re-enactment" he tries to fulfill her wish and to stay by her side as she faces death. On the night before a typhoon, Grandpa collapses from exhaustion at the door, revealing his secret "garden project". This becomes an unseen emotional force that helps the rest of the family work through their own troubles with time. Seventeen-year-old grandson Wang Qian begins to change and grow after the long frustration of a heartbreak at school, and his middle-aged father, Wang Yunjiang, struggles to emerge from his own anxiety about time and a career crisis. The seasons flow on, the plants of the south grow and wither, and life's "growth" and "decline", wrapped in the warm, humid air of the south, create subtle "connections" and "repetitions" in each of them...
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Genre:
Drama, Family, Coming-of-age -
Director:
Huang Hang
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Screenwriter:
Huang Hang