{"id":6272,"date":"2023-03-27T14:31:45","date_gmt":"2023-03-27T18:31:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chinacenter.net\/?p=6272"},"modified":"2023-04-06T17:29:26","modified_gmt":"2023-04-06T21:29:26","slug":"film-review-chinas-last-peasant-in-return-to-dust-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinacenter.net\/2023\/china-currents\/22-1\/film-review-chinas-last-peasant-in-return-to-dust-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Film Review: \u201cChina\u2019s Last Peasant in Return to Dust (2022)\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
Return to Dust <\/i>(2022) is director and screenwriter Li Ruijun’s (born in 1983) sixth feature film. Similar to Li\u2019s earlier films, including The Old Donkey<\/i> (2010), Fly with the Crane<\/i> (2012), and River Road<\/i> (2015), this film is set in his hometown, a remote and sandy village in Gaotai county, located in Gansu Province in Northwestern China. Most of Li\u2019s films are concerned with the marginalization and demise of the traditional agricultural lifestyle in the face of China\u2019s rapid urbanization and modernization. Consistent with earlier generations of Chinese independent filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke, Li employs a documentary and v\u00e9rit\u00e9 filmmaking style, featuring long takes, non-professional actors (most of them are Li\u2019s relatives), and the use of the local Gansu rural dialect. In Return to Dust<\/i>, Li further blends reality and fiction by casting a well-known actress, Hai Qing, as the disabled and incontinent female protagonist Cao Guiying, and a non-professional actor, Wu Renlin (Li\u2019s uncle-in-law) as the male protagonist, Ma Youtie, an impoverished and exploited peasant. The plot revolves around how these two middle-aged social outcasts gradually develop love in their arranged marriage and find happiness in the everyday hardship of farming and home-building. In many senses, this is a typical arthouse film, which usually targets a small niche domestic audience in big urban cities and an international audience in film festivals. But this low-budget film, with a cost of about 2 million RMB1<\/a><\/sup>, became the greatest box office sensation in the summer of 2022 in China. It grossed over 100 million RMB during its 67 days of showing in theatres (July 8-September 12) before it was suddenly and mysteriously taken down from all the country\u2019s theatres and streaming sites.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n The film can be read as an elegy for the vanishing rural world in contemporary China. With the mass exodus of local young peasants migrating to urban industrial cities like Shenzhen and Dongguan \u2014 which Ma Youwen and Ma Chengwan briefly represent in the film \u2014 there are many discarded vacant houses for the homeless Ma Youtie and his newlywed wife to dwell in temporarily.<\/p>\n