Synopsis

Drugs or politics?

The last season of opium cultivation in the Golden Triangle of Myanmar and the living conditions of local users in the post-opium era.

Deng’e Township is located in the second special zone of the Wa State of Myanmar. During land reform and the Cultural Revolution in China, many people fled here, forming the largest concentration of ethnic Chinese in the region. This film focuses on the lives of Li Simei and Granny Chen during the three-year buffer period after drug prohibition. Day-to-day life does not change; grown-up children seem to retread the paths of their parents. A China that they cannot go back to, a status that is not formally recognised: here is a geopolitically marginalized “enclave” with no identity. The generational cycle of “drugs”, general hardship, struggle, and survival are people’s only reasons for existence here. Behind this century’s promise of drug controls there is a lack of humanitarianism, and the concept of “nation” is just a fiction. Amidst this game of politics, history, and drugs, individuals in the “Golden Triangle” must tragically fend for themselves. The lives of Li and Chen, far from their hometowns, dissipate along a course set by history in the mountainous lands of northern Myanmar that were once full of poppies.