Review | Berlin 2025: Living the Land movie review – searing depiction of China’s rural poor

Non-professional actors and stunning camerawork lift this engrossing story of the drastic changes experienced in rural China

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Wang Shang (left) and Zhang Chuwen in a still from Living the Land, directed by Huo Meng and screened in competition at the 2025 Berlin Internaitonal Film Festival. Photo: Floating Light (Foshan) Film and Culture

Published: 10:15pm, 14 Feb 2025Updated: 9:54am, 23 Feb 2025

4.5/5 stars

Contemporary Chinese cinema is littered with decades-spanning epics designed to chronicle the country’s changing fortunes in the 20th century.

With Living the Land, which won the best director award at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival, Huo Meng has achieved the same objective with a film unfolding across merely a year.

Revolving around a clan of impoverished farmers in Henan province, central China, in 1991, Huo’s second feature is a visually captivating, studiously structured and ceaselessly humane account of the anguish, anxiety and agitation sweeping rural China on the cusp of the country’s turbocharged plunge into market economics.

A still from Living the Land. Photo: Floating Light (Foshan) Film and Culture

Bolstered by remarkably affecting performances from his ensemble of non-professional actors and stunning camerawork that reveals village life at its happiest and harshest, Huo has made a great leap forward from his debut, the modestly budgeted road movie Crossing the Border – Zhaoguan from 2018.

Central to Living the Land is Chuang (Wang Shang), a boy living with his mother’s extended family in a hamlet where electricity is scarce, tractors even more so, and struggling peasants make bricks in rickety kilns or even sell their blood to survive.