About Nüwa

During the editing process after filming was completed, I found myself asking the same question again and again: why is this story worth being watched?

Some suggested that I include direct footage from before and after my grandmother’s passing, in order to create the strongest possible emotional climax. I do have such material. However, I have always remembered the last time I spent with her. In her long periods of confusion, she was still lucid enough to tell me clearly that she wanted to age with dignity, and that she did not wish for more people to witness the most undignified moments of her final stage of life.

So the footage of us lying side by side, captured by a GoPro, is something I have never watched even once myself. I know that I do not need to manufacture an emotional peak and this has never been the purpose of my documentation.

For this reason, there is no grand narrative here, nor any sense of the exotic or the spectacular. Who would want to watch a story about my hometown and its river?

There must be thousands, perhaps millions, of rivers and towns on this planet, oceans and fishing boats, forests and villages...... As economies and ways of life continue to shift, countless family stories emerge, both alien and deeply familiar, between ancestors and descendants. If this documentary appears so plain and so common to audiences beyond myself and my family, then what makes it worth watching at all?

Yet plainness carries sincerity, and commonality often gives rise to resonance. Perhaps nothing is more moving than that.

Here, I want to thank my audiences. Although I never intended to harvest your tears, hearing your applause in the cinema, your quiet sobs, and seeing the moisture in your eyes made me more certain than ever why I chose to make this work.

In those moments, were you also thinking of your own river?

A long synopsis: 

A river winds through Pingli, the filmmaker’s ancestral hometown in Shaanxi. Once thriving, but later scarred by pollution and the need for economic development in an ever-hungry world. After decades of neglect, the river is now in the early stages of recovery. For generations, it has shaped local life, carrying memories of work, migration, loss, and renewal.

Following the same road from the filmmaker’s childhood, the documentary went back to the old house by the river and observed its flow and surroundings.

During production, archival photographs taken decades earlier by the filmmaker’s late grandfather surfaced, revealing scenes of the river before these transformations. These images become a quiet counterpoint within the film, bridging past and present. It underscored how much of the river’s original world has been overwritten. Those earlier images spoke of a landscape that has since faded. Yet through the filmmaker’s lens, new appearances were framed and preserved.

Tracing the river’s contemporary condition while acknowledging its depletion, the film displays how environmental and social change intersect in rural China today. It invites viewers to consider what is lost, what persists, and what recovery might mean for a place shaped by both memory and modernisation.

Director Statement: 

This documentary began with an urge I could not rationally explain. In the first month of my postgraduate study, the idea of making a film about my hometown river surfaced, long before I could articulate why. Only later did I understand that it was shaped by a profound emotional bond with my family, and by a desire to create an audiovisual archive of life along the river in Pingli. The film is at once a personal gift to my parents and a small ethnography of the community that lives by its waters. It’s was also my final chance and to be with my grandmother, who since passed away during the editing process.

Growing up in the city, I seldom visited my familial home. In my view, it had always been both alien and comforting. In my memories lies its waters, the scent of pine, the sight of earthen houses, and fleeting childhood visits. It’s a nostalgic freshness. Over the past decades, the river has shifted from natural abundance, to pollution in pursuit of industrial growth, to partial recovery through greening policies. As a child, I saw dams as tombstones of nature, mourning what I imagined as lost purity, without recognising how electricity, roads, and running water transformed people’s lives. Making this film meant confronting my own misgivings and childhood arrogance, whilst also resisting the easy critique of modernisation. Instead, I sought to uncover and perceive the uneasy balance between human development and the natural world.

Nüwa, is the mother goddess who carries primal energy equally loving and frightening. The river is said to be her birthplace in which she nourished and brought about her children, humankind, whilst retaining the capacity to flood their fields and sweep away on a whim. Human beings have since prayed to the river, used it, polluted it, forgotten it, and later sought to govern it. To me, the river was never only the water flowing in its bed; it embodies nature itself. This became the foundation of my film’s tone, though not its storyline in its entirety.

The narrative I chose is simple: to invite the audience to walk with me, to observe the river, and to search for why it demanded that I film it. I wanted viewers to sense the presence and the power of Nüwa flowing through every part of local life, in tandem with the rhythms of human life along the river. I linked the smallest private emotions with the vastness of myth, letting the transition and comparisons between the micro and the macro occur naturally. The visual language draws on Chinese literary imagery, seeking calmness, determination, and space for silence. Long still shots enable the river to speak for itself. Though often seen as old-fashioned in today’s fast-paced world, their very simplicity can already be considered bold. Archival photos taken by my grandfather gave direct reference points for temporal comparison. My family loved the river and the people living beside it; my love for my family, in turn, flowed into my love for the river. Beyond visuals, I chose the local traditional Huagu opera and wrote my own lyrics as the background music. With the contribution of local artists, the opera, with its raw voice, carried both a regional art form and the resonance of myth. Ultimately, this very personal project aspires to discover universal resonances through the mediums of the tension between modernization and nature, the search for belonging, or simply the beauty of water and birds in flight.

Above all, I wished for the river never to fall silent.

The last photograph of my grandmother that she allowed me to release. To me, she has always been like a tree.