wéi

The subject of this personal essay documentary is Liánwéi, the town where the author grew up and was rooted in his childhood, which in Mandarin Chinese can be directly translated as “the dykes of connection”. The author starts with the hydrology and geography of his town and adjusts the time to the 1990s before he was ever born, the time when the author’s mother’s generation was young. Therefore, a personal and painful memory is reinterpreted and restructured.

The main source of images for this work comes from author’s father, a grassroots cadre in a distant suburban township, who took the main images from the perspective of his special status, In the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in China, most of the villages and towns are distributed along the coast because of the need for primary industries. Water is the umbilical cord of fluid, the areas living around the reservoir are often prone to flooding during the rainy season in the subtropical climate of southern China, which caused the trauma of author’s mother and her generation.