A village where nothing happens and everything matters. Welcome to the void.
Unusually popular religions and extreme secular beliefs, unconstrained power and no authoritarian society, people work hard on the land and live thrifty but do not believe in the meaning of life at all. This is Longwang Village, an empty old farming society, the most essential reality of an ordinary western village. The film does not have a perpetual plot. The images are presented with the changing of the four seasons. There is no great joy or great sadness. Everything is recorded, and no results are produced. Strictly speaking, this is actually just a rural video file, a running account of ordinary western villages without all rhetoric.
Direction
Li Yifan's radical refusal of narrative manipulation
Cinematography
Seasons as silent protagonist, time made visible
Editing
Anti-rhetoric: the cut that refuses to mean
Director
Li Yifan
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Part of China's independent documentary movement (dIndependent cinema) that emerged outside state-sanctioned production, capturing rural realities CCTV would never broadcast.
Li Yifan's 'running account' method deliberately mirrors the village's own lack of historical consciousness—no one here believes their lives merit documentation, which is precisely why they must be documented.
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