Folk Song on the Plain
Hu Jie
Release year: 2002
Run time: 70 mins
Film type: Documentary
Synopsis
This song was sung by Luo Xiaojia, who was abducted as a 17-year-old girl and trafficked from the Yi nationality region of Yunnan to Shandong Province, where she was forced to marry a young peasant. The film records her family life in Shandong and her longing for her far-away hometown, which causes her to reflect on the uncertainties of fate. After ten years living in Shandong, she is finally allowed to go home for the first time. She travels all the way back to Yunnan, seeing her mother, whom she has missed for so many days and nights. She struggles over whether to go back to Shandong or stay in Yunnan. Sadly, she decides to return to Shandong, accompanied by her mother's sad folk songs.
Director biography
Hu Jie is an independent historian, artist, and filmmaker. Born in Jinan, Shandong in 1958, he graduated from the Art College of the People’s Liberation Army. He works in oils and woodcuts from his lakeside studio in Nanjing. His films are among the most important documents of China’s unacknowledged “unoffcial history”, and include Looking for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2005), about a martyr-poet critic of Mao; and Though I Am Gone (2007), about an elite Beijing girls’ high school whose students murdered their headmaster at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.