San Zimei (Three Sisters)

Wang Bing
,
FR, HK
,
2012
,
DCP
,
colour
,
153'

The film introduces us to 10-year old YingYing, 6-year-old Zhenzhen and 4-year-old Fenfen, who live alone in Xiyangtang, a tiny rural village in the high mountains of China’s Yunnan province. Their father is away working in the city; their mother left the family long ago. The girls help their grandfather or aunt in exchange for meals. They spend their days at grueling tasks: herding sheep, goats and pigs, searching for firewood, collecting dung. Games are few and far between. The eldest, Yingying, is her sisters’ primary caretaker, shouldering responsibilities far beyond her years.

When I first met the family, I was touched by the incredibly difficult situation in which those kids were growing up. It reminded me of my childhood, and the poverty I had to face and adapt to. It’s an inhuman world where these young human beings live like animals, yet at the same time so human as the bound exists between them helps them cope with life. This is why I want to testify about the reality of these poor peasants’ children’s life in contemporary China. The image of modernity, of economic development, and of an almost occidental world that China is presenting nowadays has slowly made the other side – the human side – disappear from our sight. What about the humanity in all of that? Those who can’t go to school because of the lack of money? And those who survive without much hope to benefit from economic growth? I didn’t want to make an ethnographical study of the family. I wanted to leave the experience of this life directly to the audience, with the idea of a direct comprehension of the universality of those children’s lives, a more objective and direct image of their reality, in order to feel and understand in their inner self the intimate feelings of this family.” (WB)

 

Mandarin with English subtitles