11 Flowers

A small town in Guizhou, 1975, in the closing years of the Cultural Revolution. Eleven-year-old Wang Han came here from Shanghai with his family under the Third Front programme, the state's relocation of industry into the interior. Playing by the river, his new shirt is taken by a man on the run, who presses it against his wound and promises to replace it if the boy keeps quiet about where he is hiding. Wang Xiaoshuai took the story from his own childhood; his family made the same move from Shanghai to Guizhou under the same programme, and the boy's name is the name the director carried as a child. The film does not narrate the big history directly. Everything is seen from the edge of an adult world a child does not understand, out of half-heard conversations and things kept from him.