And the Spring Comes

In a small industrial town near Baotou, the music teacher Wang Cailing has a voice too large for where she is, and she wants the national opera stage. She is not dreaming alone: around her are a young man who intends to be China’s Van Gogh, a ballet dancer past his time, and others carrying comparable hopes. The film is less interested in whether any of them arrive than in what it costs them to be understood and accepted at all. The people around Cailing discuss her face rather than her voice, and the summaries of the film in circulation have done the same for years; what it actually shows is what becomes of talent in a place that will not make room for it. Gu Changwei directed from a screenplay by Li Qiang, and Jiang Wenli took the best actress award at the 2007 Rome Film Festival.