The planning phase began at the start of the pandemic, for a new highway intended to pass right through the centre of Xiangzidian, a village in Shaanxi province. Born and raised in the village and marooned there by Covid, director Hu Sanshou could thus document the process from the start, in lingering wide shots and gentle pans of an unostentatious beauty, their all-enveloping focus punctuated by comments from the villagers wandering through the frame and Hu’s own voiceover commentary. Compensation notices are posted and graves relocated before construction begins, which stretches over years and numerous changes of season. Once the surface of the road is laid out, it does indeed resemble a stage and the local inhabitants move around on it as if being directed from afar, which is not inaccurate. Yet the great expanse of white pebbles is also akin to the pages of a vast book, which Hu fills with novelistic detail, narrating countless anecdotes about friends, family members and acquaintances that begin in the present and stretch way back into the past, capturing the cadence of that amorphous in-between phase between tradition and modernity which the traffic will soon drown out. If the violence of village life leaves little room for nostalgia, it is a sad story nonetheless. Whether tales of joy, hardship or simple endurance, folk memory and its loss touch us all.

James Lattimer