The Silver Bear winner for Best Director at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival, Chinese filmmaker Huo Meng’s elliptical and elegant sophomore feature is. equal parts coming-of-age tale and epic portrait of provincial life. In the village of Bawangtai in 1991, time appears to have stood still. Despite the rapid industrialization happening in cities across China, everyday rural life for farming families in the Henan province remains steadfastly tied to the demands of the land. 10-year-old Xu Chuang, the third-born child of one such family, is unceremoniously left with his wheat farmer uncle when his parents and older siblings set out to find work in the Southern city of Shenzhen. Cared for though unable to shake the feeling he doesn’t belong with the extended Li family, Chuang finds comfort in a young aunt – who feels similarly uneasy as she is pressured to marry – and his surly but kind nonagenarian great-grandmother. Each season rolls into the next, and Chuang learns the quotidian rhythms of the land which they all till, at once bucolic, cruel, cyclical and nourishing