Director: Liu Huawen

Synopsis

Zhou Ye has a strong gift for reading and a keen sense of life, but for a teenager these abilities only add to her burdens. She seeks an emotional outlet through "dreaming," yet still clashes with her mother. The core conflict of the film is between Zhou Ye's inner world and literary talent and the demands of the outside world, expressed as quarrels and conflicts with her mother. In the end, mother and daughter come to understand each other's thoughts and difficulties in different ways, both bravely face their own problems, and a family bond of real mutual understanding is formed. Every shot in the film was made with a mobile phone, using many unusual angles and extreme art direction. Children in their school years are often surrounded by confusion and uncertainty. Much of the so-called smoky feel in the film appears together with dusk, confinement and nagging, all of which I often encountered in my own school years. The 4:3 frame, the mother and daughter surrounded by green plants, and the crowded space filled again with dense air create a sense of oppression that gives form to the confusion and uncertainty of youth, and to the stirrings of adolescence as I imagine them. In the words of Kahlil Gibran: "Your children are not your children." This is why I made the film and what I want to say. The film also tries to find connections between Generation Z and current family conflicts in society, looking for points where old and new intersect and share common ground.