Always (2025)

Chen Deming | US, France, China,Taiwan | 2025 | 88 min | PG (Some Disturbing Scenes) Children’s poetry and a boy’s life in rural China frame this beautifully atmospheric, arresting and sensitive rumination on childhood. Eight-year-old Gong Youbin writes and reads a short melancholic poem about uncertainty to his class. At ease in his surroundings, he plays with friends and in the fields and forests between helping on the farm. Life appears simple in mountainous Shangzhi County, Hunan, but given what little they have, Youbin’s disabled father and elderly grandparents grapple with decisions for their continued survival while flanked by promises of a better future. Profound poetry by the village’s children, rendered in expressive calligraphy, punctuate patient observations of the sky, trees, labour, animals, fog and inner thoughts, as they swirl with unseen forces of nature, policy or fate. Time passes, childhood becomes memory.