The film Always is presented as a letter to childhood and paints an honest, tender, and poetic portrait of a young, talented student, Youbin Gong, and his family’s modest daily life as farmers in the mountains of Hunan. The camera captures, with sensational precision and in magnificent black and white, fragments of the reality of isolated, rural China, where laborious work in the fields and pastures meets and diverges from poetry lessons at school. Punctuated with the echoes of a sound system playing various government communications and poems in calligraphy superimposed on images of the landscape, this film evokes solitude, precarity, uncertainty, and the loss of innocence. Through the inspiring cinematic vision of filmmaker Deming Chen, it simultaneously frames the role of art as a medium for expression and a means of existing in the world.(HSB)

Quebec Premiere

Always