Another Year

又一年

2016 | China | Documentary | 181 min | Color | Chinese Regional Dialect | Trailer

Director & Editor: Shengze Zhu | Producer: Zhengfan Yang & Shengze Zhu | Cinematographer: Zhengfan Yang | Sound Mix: Dejian Ou

SYNOPSIS

Thirteen dinners of a three-generation Chinese migrant worker’s family over the course of fourteen months. Beginning and ending around the Chinese New Year, the meals unfold in real-time through static, long takes and reveal the rhythm of a family’s life on the margins of urban society. Attention is paid to the dramatic, as with grandma's stroke, as well as the mundane, such as a new pair of eyeglasses; incessant economic pressures are presented at the table, as tangibly as the steamed pork and bowls of congee. With rigorous formal constrains, the film captures subtly shifting family dynamics and unveils how the mundane can appear mysterious and beautiful with the passage of time. Through examining the lives of migrant workers, who have left their ancestral rural homelands to seek opportunity in urban cities, ANOTHER YEAR crafts a meditation on China’s economic boom and its massive urbanization.