People say that if you stand too close to an elephant, you can never see the whole of it. I think that is true of me, my mother and my hometown. I was born into an ordinary Daur family on the Inner Mongolian grasslands, and confrontation was the normal state of my relationship with my mother. After we grew apart, I began to imagine: what would it be like to be tied to my sick mother with a rope for a whole year? Then I opened my laptop and began writing this story.
Zheren, a Mongolian morin khuur player working in Beijing, gets a call from his mother one night: she has had Alzheimer's disease for years and suddenly no longer recognises him. He takes leave from his ethnic orchestra and goes home to see her. He discovers that his elder brother, to stop their mother from wandering off, has been keeping her locked in a room with bars on the windows, and that her mental state is dangerously frail. After the brothers blame and curse each other, Zheren angrily takes his mother away from the city to the grasslands for a change of scene. Back in the place where she was born and raised, his mother unexpectedly sings a funeral song for the deceased at a funeral, then leaves that night without a word. When Zheren and the herders find her the next day, she keeps repeating that she wants to follow the "moving house" to find her husband, who disappeared many years ago. Ignoring her pleas, he forces her back to his brother's home in the city. But there is no longer any place for her there, and Zheren has to take her back to the grasslands. To keep her from disappearing again, he moves his bed into her room and ties a rope around both their waists so she can never leave his sight. This new form of confinement not only torments his mother but also tests Zheren's own heart......
Genre:
Drama, FamilyRelease Date:
2023-03-18 (Chinese Mainland)Selection Year and Section:
Top 30, Main Project Section, 2020Director/Screenwriter:
Qiao SixueCast:
Badema | Yider | NahoyaProducer:
Liu HuiExecutive Producer:
Yao Chen | Cao YuAsian Future, 35th Tokyo International Film Festival (Official Selection) / Main Competition, Golden Coconut Awards, 4th Hainan Island International Film Festival (Official Selection) / Best Technical Achievement, Main Competition, Golden Coconut Awards, 4th Hainan Island International Film Festival / Best New Screenwriter of the Year, 30th Shanghai Film Critics Awards
A rope binds a Mongolian mother and son as they travel from the city to the grasslands, feeling how nature regards life and death.