Return to Dust - YIN RU CHEN YAN

Pitch

In the Chinese countryside, not far from the Gobi Desert, Ma leads a hard life as a farmer on the plots of land he rents from a cooperative. He is the last of his siblings to have not yet married. At his age, that's unthinkable. So his brothers and sisters decide to marry him off to Guiying, a woman in frail health, whom the community considers mentally challenged. This marriage suits her family just fine too. Brought together by fate, Ma and Guiying start their own home and open up to each other. "I always return to film the land where I was born. The two protagonists of my film come from a countryside that has been deserted. They all took the train to the city. My two protagonists missed that train." It's a bit like two people on bicycles trying to catch a high-speed train… In China, there are about 80,000 movie screens, but you rarely see lives similar to those of my two characters. Today, as our ancestral and local traditions disappear in favor of forced urbanization, I wanted to preserve a record of these simple, rural lives, to pay homage to this land that nourished my soul and remains my main source of inspiration.” Li Ruijun