Skip to content

Er Dong

Yang Jin

Release year: 2008

Run time: 150 mins

Film type: Fiction

Synopsis

Deep in the mountains of China there is a large rock known as the Baby Selling Stone. People forced to sell their children for reasons such as poverty often wait by the stone for buyers.

One winter, it was still snowing in February. After passing the Baby Selling Stone on his way home from working outside the village, Yang Silang returned with a baby boy. He called him “Er Dong”. Soon after, Yang Silang died. His widow raised Er Dong on her own. Er Dong grew up obstinate. The more his mother doted on him, the more unruly he became. He was a big headache for her—messing about with a shotgun, getting into fights, and riding around on a motorbike. She sent him away to board at a Christian missionary school. He ran away from the school, eloping with a girl called Yang Chang’e. Then Er Dong began to discover just how hard life can be. When Chang’e got pregnant, he was forced to return home and get married. Shouldering his responsibilities, he began to wonder what life was all about. However, industrialization has been developing rapidly in the countryside, and Er Dong discovers it is harder than ever to make something out of his life.

 

Director biography

Born in 1982, Yang Jin graduated with a degree in Film Education from the School of Art and Communication, Beijing Normal University. His film The Black and White Milk Cow (2004) won the Ecumenical Jury Award and the Don Quixote Prize at the 19th Fribourg International Film Festival and the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema Award in the 7th Osian’s-Cinefan Film Festival. In 2008, his second feature film Er Dong earned a Special Mention in the New Currents section of the 13th Busan International Film Festival.