Mr. Tree

Shu is an unemployed man in a mining town in northern China. Everyone calls him Tree. He sees things, mixes his past up with his present, and nobody in the town takes him seriously. Then one of his visions turns out to be true, and the same people start treating him as a seer. Is Shu actually seeing the future, or is he simply appearing the way everyone wants him to appear? Han Jie directs, with Wang Baoqiang in the lead. It tells the story of a fast-changing rural China, of houses coming down and people leaving for cities, through the disintegrating mind of one man. The film circulated in China as a cult item for years.