This is a huge proposition impossible to convey thoroughly in one film, but it is enough to trigger some discussions and thoughts if it’s released. To touch on this subject, the Land Reform Movement is inescapable. I personally think it is the most critical point in China’s history after 1949, not inferior to the well-known Cultural Revolution. I didn’t know how to touch it with a film for a long time until I saw Li Shijiang’s short story “Trick of Grandpa’s Ghost.” The scenes it described fit so well with my experience in the relationship between dreams and reality. Dreams can take you anywhere, and you can’t go back to the world in your dreams when you wake up in reality. Sometimes, you will think like Zhuangzi with his dream of the butterfly: which one is real? What’s more impressive is that you may have only a few seconds to enter the dream and have already experienced life, ageing, sickness and death. The passion after reading the story drove me. In a very short time, I have conceived a timeline with broken and interrupted events of the Land Reform Movement, using a few disrupted moments to present the historical scenes from decades ago in a film. For most Chinese, especially the younger generation, even though it has profoundly influenced Chinese lives, this period of China is chaotic and disorderly, just like the fleeting time fragments in this movie, and it is difficult to distinguish between true and false.

Wo Tu is a ten-year-old child; he is a blank sheet of paper; occasionally, I feel that he is myself. I was born in 1966, and I had not experienced China before that personally. I involve myself from the descriptions in books and the oral narrations of the elders. I rely on them to bring myself into that history, just like what Grandpa did in the movie. In Chinese culture, we believe that longing for the deceased will bring them to our dreams; in this way, we know their wishes. In the meantime, the deceased who miss children in the world will also visit them in their dreams. Therefore, the dreams have a double meaning in the movie: whether Wo Tu dreams of grandpa or grandpa gives Wo Tu a dream? Just like Grandpa’s line: I dreamed that my grandson dreamed of me. It’s his longing for Wo Tu, and also his longing for Wo Tu’s missing him. Grandpa finally revealed the knot in his heart, he wanted to tell Wo Tu in person, I did something bad, but I am not a bad person. The so-called bad thing, of course, is the fate of most ordinary people in that era: in order not to be abandoned by the revolutionary torrent, they would rather betray their beloved ones. This was commonplaces in the rural land reform and urban factory restructuring from private to nation-owned at that time, exactly the same as during the Cultural Revolution. So many husbands and sons were mutually exposed and criticized, their families were broken, and many committed suicide. This is also like Li Haiyan in my previous film “So Long, My Son”, who most wanted to hear Liyun’s forgiveness before her death.

In today’s China, after nearly 20 years of high-speed economic development and rapid urbanization, poor people from rural areas have been rushing into the cities crazily, and the land is abandoned behind. In the movie, Grandpa sticks to the land he cherishes, but with his passing, the family traces on the land have evaporated. This is a part of my reflection on today’s China through “Wo Tu”. Whether it is the Land Reform Movement that started in the 1950s, the private-to-national entrepreneurship movement, or the ten-year turmoil of the Cultural Revolution that followed, they are all interrelated and profoundly affecting China and the Chinese people.

Wang Xiaoshuai