Twenty plus classmates look back into the past, tracing backthrough a 30 year history. One after another adapts to the random events that come to shape their lives, to the four seasons of life and nature. These descendants of mine workers graduated in 1978 from Tongchuan Coal Mine Middle School in Sha’anxi. The years they were about experience coincided with the reforms and opening up of China. Floating in the changes of the new era, some experience compromises and the loss of ideals, whilst some keep struggling ahead with great determination. Thirty years later, Lin Xin encounters his old classmates, and records their individual lives and history; the ease of monotony, the loneliness of success, the weariness of a life of plentiful, the helplessness of poverty… all come forth in the lives of these group of people, becoming an epitome of the lives of ordinary people in small to middle-sized cities in this era, and at the same time reflecting on a generation that advances forward undefeated.
As as a 1978 grade student at the Sanlitong Coal Mine Middle School of Tongchuan, I struggled between the twofold consuming conflict of making a living and artistic creativity. Most of my old classmates still live in that same city, each living their spells of good and bad fortune and their different destinies. The imprints of the era congeal into individual trajectories, and the vicissitudes of life come to put a veil on their once young faces… I once again come to meet with each of them. My expectations are constantly rectified by reality during the filming, many things exceeding my imagination. I come to accept the manipulation of fate. Whether fortuitously or inevitably, I’ve come to meet them again and record their life experiences and their situations, perceiving through this the frailty and tenaciousness of life. Their happiness and sorrows, hopes and despair, all continually deepen my understanding of life, as well as my knowledge of this generation.
海報
電影劇照
劇照2