The story was partly inspired by a farcical news item. It happened to fit with my own thinking, so I grafted the two together. First, I wanted to show the particular character of the Chinese county town. Second, I wanted to look at the lives of some young people in county towns: lonely, awkward and absurd, but not dull. Gou Feng, Yang Xiaoyong and Peng Lixing in the story are people who do not want to be swept along by the current of life, yet do not know where to go. The flame in their hearts that will not go out is both a brave hope and the root of their loneliness. None of them can find their place in life. They are all aliens who have fallen into a county town.
At the turn of winter and spring in 2019, in an ordinary northern county town on the Yellow River, a young man named Gou Feng loses two fingers in an accident. Gou Feng is over thirty, married with a child, and runs a shop repairing excavators. Besides repairing machines, he likes to write poetry. His life should have been one whose end he could see from the start, but the lost fingers send ripples through its still waters. No longer able to repair excavators, Gou Feng looks for new work, only to find there is nothing he can do. Having lost his fingers, he also seems to have lost his place. At the same time, he suffers the disappointment of seeing the girl he secretly loves marry someone else, the joy of discovering that his son has a poet's potential, and friends who draw near and pull away, each with their own motives. Falling asleep and waking again and again, Gou Feng becomes confused between dream and reality. On another disappointing night, while writing poetry by the Yellow River, Gou Feng catches an alien. It becomes the high point of his thirty years of ordinary life, but it also leads to his mysterious disappearance...
Genre:
Drama, Absurd Realism, Dark ComedyDirector/Screenwriter:
Xing LipengProducer:
Liu LeiXing Lipeng: young screenwriter and director with a master's degree in filmmaking from the Communication University of China. A screenplay won the Creative Screenplay Award of the Xia Yan Cup, organised by the National Radio and Television Administration. Short films include Position and Boss Gou, selected for the China-Korea University Student Film Festival, the Beijing College Student Film Festival and the New Talent Film Festival, among others.
Liu Lei: young producer who has worked at Tianhua Huatian Pictures and Dongfang Tianming Film Co., Ltd. Co-producer of the film The Train to Spring, executive producer of Study Abroad Counter-Strategy, and producer of Where Do We Grow, which was selected for the Young Directors Project of the 22nd Shanghai International Film Festival and the top five of the Qingcong Project.
A young man in a county town loses two fingers in an accident and can no longer find his place there. Falling asleep and waking again and again, confused between dream and reality, he finally turns into an alien and mysteriously disappears.