ALAO'S VILLAGE

Returning to the village where he grew up, a young man probes the gap between his memories of the place he knew as a child and the realities of the community to which he returns. Surrounded by gray hills and cultivated fields, dotted with modest tiled-roof houses, Xiaoyi Village in Yunnan Province represents a crossroads for filmmaker Li Youjie, known as Alao. Born to a family of farmers, Alao’s newly acquired university education and expensive video camera signify the growing divergence between his path and village life. Former friends have resigned themselves to lives of manual labor, and Alao’s family frets over his future: Will he use the education they struggled to provide, get a good job, and settle down? In keen observations of children, elders, and the starkly rural landscape, Alao revisits and reflects on his relationship with his beloved grandmother, and attempts to work through the estrangement he feels from his parents, a solitary process with revelations at turns charming and bewildering, and ever laden with the weight of familial expectations.

A labor of love several years in the making, Li Youjie describes the formation of Alao’s Village as “a slow and constant inner struggle of coming to terms with my relationship with the place where I grew up. I felt as if I was dissecting myself with a knife and extracting tumors from my body.” As Alao films his grandmother, parents, and fellow villagers, he constructs a bittersweet personal memoir of childhood and loss in this lyrical documentary. – Nina Rao

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