Wang Xiaoshuai Risks China’s Wrath With ‘Above the Dust’ Screening in Berlin (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comPatrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief On Saturday, audiences in Berlin will see the world premiere of “Above the Dust,” a Chinese-made drama that plays somewhat incongruously in the Generation Kplus section, which screens films for or about children.
Whether the film plays again, and where, is moot. The film’s director Wang Xiaoshuai, a three-time winner of Silver Bear awards at the Berlinale, is taking a considerable personal risk going ahead with the screening in the absence of approval from the mainland Chinese authorities.
With a young teen boy as the protagonist, the film depicts a hardscrabble family in a village in northwest China in 2009. While their neighbors slowly migrate to the city, the boy’s parents dig up the arid land in search of family heirlooms.
Communicating with the ghost of his grandfather, the boy learns about the 1950s reforms that transferred peasant-owned land to the government and about the disastrous Great Leap Forward. (By 1960, Mao Zedong’s attempt to change small family farms into urbanized collectives and the simultaneous attempt to stimulate industrial development led to 30 million deaths through famine and disease, and a further exodus from the countryside.) Wang’s film was submitted for Chinese censorship approval in October 2022, but has not completed the process.
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