‘Only rain and snow for water’: Chinese filmmaker charts her family’s rise from harsh rural roots
- New York-based Zhao Yehui’s great-grandfather founded a village of cave homes on China’s Loess Plateau. She returned there to tell her family’s story in a film
Filmmaker and multimedia artist Zhao Yehui went looking for country roads to take her home – or more accurately, to the home of her forebears, shrouded in the mists of time. But once there, she found more than mere ghosts.
In a pocket of the Loess Plateau, in central China’s Shanxi province, Zhao found her way to the village of Xi Jiao Gou – and into the centre of a family story embracing revolution, famine, conflict and eventual dispersal.
Zhao chronicles the lives and times of four generations in her forthcoming film, May the Soil be Everywhere, begun in 2021 and now in post-production. “It’s my first feature-length documentary and spans the seasons of the village,” says Zhao, 32, on a Zoom call from her home in New York.
But before those seasons could be depicted, the village had to be identified. And that meant finding the century-old cave dwellings built by her great-grandfather.
Zhao, who left her native Taiyuan, the Shanxi capital, to study in the United States in 2015, won a US$25,000 International Documentary Association award to cover production costs. She recently spent seven months researching and shooting her film – and discovering how harsh life once was – back in her homeland.
